Gemini Fails, Claude Improves
I literally just talked about how Gemini has improved a lot - two weeks ago. True to form though, it feels like Gemini often takes one step forward, then two steps back. My ‘fail” experience with Gemini today is in trying out its new Scheduled Actions feature. Google’s own blog post announcing this feature says this (emphasis mine):
With scheduled actions, you can streamline routine tasks or receive personalized updates directly from Gemini. In your conversation, simply ask Gemini to perform a task at a specific time, or transform a prompt you're already using into a recurring action. You can manage them anytime within the scheduled actions page within settings.
Now you can wake up with a summary of your calendar and unread emails …
The summary of unread emails sounded great. This was something I already had in mind to try out, specifically for summaries from a number of AI focused email newsletters I subscribe to. So I asked Gemini to give a summary of highlights and ket takeaways from recent, unread emails from 8 of those newsletters. I use Gmail, so this should be a walk in the park for Gemini. But … here’s the response I got:
I’ll keep trying other scheduled actions with Gemini, but that’s not great start.
On a much happier note, Claude keeps on delivering good results and nice new features and feature level ups. The one that caught my eye this morning was all about more things to do with Claude’s Artifacts feature. The quiz result image at the top of the post is from a quiz that Claude generated.
I’m currently wrapping up my study for the Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) certification exam. I’m at the point where I’m just taking practice tests and reviewing my results, and focusing on review of any questions I’m getting wrong. I bought an official study guide for CISM and along with that I have access to full 150 questions practice tests. Having done that a couple of time, it would be great to have some quicker, shorter practice test. There are apps for this, but it also felt like a fun thing to try out with Claude. Turns out it’s a fun thing and a really useful thing to do with Claude.
I started by giving Claude a simple prompt and (pasting in alongside my prompt) some notes on some correct answers I wanted to review:
I did that in the Claude web app and it worked well. Then I wanted to expand out from there, see if Claude could generate its own set of practice questions from across the domains covered in CISM, with no notes from me. And I wanted to to refresh my memory on whether Claude could do this on its mobile app. The answer to that second part is “absolutely” on its Android app, and the new quizzes generated from all the CISM domains are excellent.
Here’s the Claude Android app cooking up the first all domains quiz:
Here are a couple of the quiz questions Claude generated:
I love the fact that now on my phone all I have to do is say to Claude “Great, lets do another one” covering all the CISM domains again and it spits out another short, solid practice test for me.