Gemini is a Better Assistant on Pixel Phones and Another Reason to Love Poe
Google’s Gemini AI app on Pixel phone the other day. The update makes it more capable of doing at least a few of the things that Google Assistant always did. I just tried out talking to Gemini and having it do three Assistant like tasks for me:
Get directions for me for a venue that I’ve never been to before and I’m going to meet a friend at on Friday evening, and pull up Maps to show me the directions
Add a calendar entry for that meetup and add the venue’s location
Set a reminder for me to try out a new formation for my Tottenham Hotspurs team in Football Manager this evening
This is not a groundbreaking update, Assistant did these things pretty well. It does start to address one annoying aspect of using Gemini though. If you choose to use Gemini it hijacks Assistant’s role by default - and before this update it sucked at the Assistant side of things. So, progress is welcome here.
Another bit of news, or more so news commentary, that caught my eye this week is from a slice of The Neuron’s daily newsletter:
The sheer velocity of new AI model releases lately is dizzying.
Two weeks ago, it was Gemini Pro 1.5 and Grok 1.5. Last week it was Llama 3. And this week, it’s Phi 3 (try it HuggingFace here) …
And then there’s this part:
With all these new models flooding the market, folks are scrambling to figure out which are the crème de la crème.
^^^ That one of course made me think of the tool I said is now the most useful GenAI app just a few days ago:
What do you all think? Have any of you been using Gemini? Or trying out Poe?