i dont want to use AI at all, anywhere, lol. google/samsung tried to force bixby down our throats and now they’re doing the same with Gemini. i dont want any part of it!!!
Ok Grandpa.
I’d take a semi-aware grandpa any time over a completely tech-oblivious, doom-scrolling facebook-and-X-twat 😁
Go do some vibe coding ya neckbeard.
I prefer paying people to do that, but thanks.
So just a hypocrite then.
Brother, its okay not to be okay. Theres help for everyone out there.
You’re cute. Are you available as a plushie?
Yes
Wild that people just casually admit to outsourcing their thinking to a machine. I’d never willing post something that embarrassing. Butlerian Jihad Now.
I’m not going to lie I use AI. It is better then search for looming things up. And I have vibe coded a few niche things for myself.
Go back to candles and charcoal pencil on tree bark then. Take it all the way, you are against all forms of technological improvement while communicating online. Your hypocrisy is leaking.
Nah you just have innovation bias. Newer does not automatically mean better. That’s a wild take in 2026 since all of these companies have been marching towards enshitification for a decade.
Plenty of research showing that use of AI is just offloading your cognitive function. We know enough about neuroplasticity to clearly see this will impair those who use it for everything. It’s important to be challenged sometimes, the illusion of intelligence does nothing for us.
yea but have you tried it?
i’ve been doing so for a week and i feel smarter already
no, maybe I’m prejudiced against rocks
*grandma, you ugly bitch :)
Ok Claude.
You’d think someone as artistic as you would understand how insane it is to blindly accept AI.
Artistic? I see nothing in their posts to prove that they haven’t been reposting from other sources or straight up posting slop. Not that post history is everything, I’m not one to post myself, but based on the pro-AI stance, I am fully willing to believe the latter.
I gave them the benefit of doubt instead of accusing them without evidence.
. The biggest of them involves how Gemini could bear the load of mundane or mindless tasks you do on your phone or other Android devices.
Like…what?
Exactly, we don’t need it for anything. I have zero tasks that I need automation for on my phone. In fact, I have typically zero tasks that I need to do on my phone at all.
You know what tasks I actually NEED to do? I need to mow my back yard, and I need to install gutters on my house. AI is not going to help any of that, so it’s useless for my needs. Meanwhile, it is wasting a fortune in energy and an environmental crisis worth of water.
“Need” really imposes some incredibly urgent something.
I actually do love automation, but why use ai for that? Macrodroid, tasker, automate… But hey, they NEED us to need it.
Paying for parking in my city requires a phone.
You either have to use the QR code, a text message, or call a line with an auto-attendant. There is no physical kiosk on the street to use.
Back when I used an iPhone, I had a few automations through Shortcuts, but nothing critical. Then I got a Pixel, put Graphene on it, and started learning how Android works. At the same time I went all in on Home Assistant over Alexa.
It’s been over a year now, so I figured I’d see what I can automate between my phone and my house.
The short answer is: nothing.
There is absolutely nothing that I need my phone to do automatically. Not a single task I need it to accomplish on my behalf.
I saw a post on Reddit a few weeks ago in the Tasker sub. A guy was talking about how one of his automations was to send a randomly selected affirmation or quote from some website to each of his loved ones at 7am. I’m still not quite over that level of psychopathy. The notion that the correct way to show affection is to have an automation randomly select a message to send them every morning.
AI could be useful if it could orchestrate more complex tasks that the relevant apps don’t natively support. But of course that’s not what we’re getting.
I use lots and lots of timers every day to structure my chores and work. For example, I’d sometimes love to be able to start one timer, and have another one set to automatically start as soon as I stop the ringing from the first (which might take a few minutes).
Very simple requirements, but specialized enough that I’d have to write it myself. But I can’t see phone AIs supporting something like this in this decade.
Like stuff. Don’t worry about it. AI will take care of everything. Now shut up and let us announce 20 more datacenters in peace.
Stuff you say? That’s the thing I like most! I’m so exited. We need more data centers!
can it block ads in the iphone
can’t block anything essential. “iphones” are the ad in itself :)
The use case for AI assistants seems to be reserving tables at a restaurant.
If that would spare me a human interaction then that’d be considered a plus! At least.
I used it on long drive this week to find local NPR stations. It was actually pretty good at that.
Then I asked it to reroute me using a different road and it said it couldn’t do that lmao. Also couldn’t understand that I wanted to find the next Wendy’s on my route despite clearly stating that multiple times. Just kept telling me to backtrack to go to random Wendy’s in the area.
So basically worthless except for finding npr stations. And even then it would vomit out a bunch of irrelevant info like the station ID and what kind of content they have. Like dude I don’t care, I just asked for the fucking frequency ffs.
Gemini is fucking garbage, it’s useless as an assistant and Google destroyed Assistant which could do genuinely helpful things like navigate hands free, set timers reliably and without Internet connections, set calendar reminders, etc.
Try to use voice commands to navigate now?
Gemini tells you to use the Maps app.
Fuck you Gemini, that’s not helpful at all.
Get your shit together Google.
The funny thing is there’s no reason for it to be so shitty just because they use Gemini for it. LLMs can use tools if given access. There’s no reason they can’t give it a tool to use intents to launch activities. I can run their own open weight Gemma model in llama.cpp and I’m pretty sure it can call tools.
Lately I feel like Google or Microsoft could pay me like a million a year and I could single-handedly fix their most broken products and the AI doesn’t even have to go. Teams? Don’t care how much tracking they put in it, it can be made more performant and the UI can be made usable. Gemini? Could legitimately be fixed to do everything the old Google assistant did and more. Outlook though? Yeah that one has to go. No saving it anymore.
Add some keyword along the lines “Tell Google Assistant to…”
You can’t tell Google Assistant shit anymore, they killed it to force people to use Gemini, which is objectively terrible as an assistant.
I know, that’s why my suggestion for improving Gemini was that they should add an option to go back to Assistant.
Ah, I thought you meant as in tricking Gemini to use Assistant somehow. Yeah, that would be great. It’s insane they got rid of it at all but Google loves killing cool/useful shit.
I’m still salty about Photosphere.
Honestly, with all the salt I have about them, I’m worried about my kidneys. I had my gripes with Assistant and didn’t personally use it much, but for hands-free operation, for example listening and responding to text messages without having to look away from the road, it was really useful.
Recently, when my wife tried answering a message, her phone apparently just responded “You seem upset” and ended the conversation. I guess that was a self-fulfilling prophecy…
I rely on Android Auto in my commute. A couple of weeks ago maps wasn’t displaying correctly, so I rebooted my phone. All of a sudden assistant was replaced… 30km later I pulled over and switched it back.
If I’m writing an SMS, I want it written, not start a dialogue with some temu hal9000 clone.
With Gemini Intelligence, Google plans to take Gemini’s agentic capabilities to the next level, where it can also handle complex tasks, such as finding the most suitable guided tours that fit your specific requirements.
Why would anyone do that ?
Seems its just an answer still searching for a question.
To save you all some time, this is the poll.
“Aren’t sold yet” from the title seems to imply the yellow section, not the red. Almost as if it’s going to be shoved down our throat no matter how we feel about it. Not that there’s been any doubt about that, but the article title is certainly telling about the bias of this article…
“Aren’t sold” would be the yellow plus the red. It doesn’t imply that they are still open to being sold on it.
It certainly implies that they can be sold. That they’re a commodity to be bartered and not individuals with their own minds. That their decision can be bought and sold rather than convinced.
Lmk when AI can clean my house and do my dishes.
Then i might be interested, maybe.
I’d rather sit and play guitar while AI does the dishes than do dishes while AI generates music.
Oh or finally drives a car! I was promised that 10 years ago.
Again, add this to the ‘no shit’ bag
Well yeah my limited experience is an android auto update replaced Assistant with Gemini, and now it can’t do anything new, only the same things much slower and with occasional really weird results. Totally worth all the lay offs and resources hogging.
Yes it is much much slower. Ask to navigate it says checking maps or something for a while then does it. Old way it just happened.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. AI can eat the entirety of my arse.
all I want was improvement to Google Assistant. I don’t want Gemini. I don’t want AI I don’t want any of this. I just want basic improvements to Google search and Google Assistant. Is that so hard to ask for?
But but but that’s not going to turn any billionaires into trillionaires, now is it? Honestly.
If we put aside the environmental damage and the capitalist aspects of LLMs, I fail to see why I should change the way I use my devices to let some hallucinating algorithm do stuff. The only times I use it is when I’m really stumped coming up with relevant search results, and even then there’s more than 50% chance that it’s not gonna achieve some break through.
I don’t want Gemini. I want Google to Keep Android Open.
Not sold is putting it very mildly. I found a fix for all of the bullshit though: you go into the default apps area and you choose none for assistant. Before I did that they had sideloaded fucking Gemini onto my phone via Android Auto and when I was trying to navigate somewhere I had to speak to some useless middle manager Gemini guy that didn’t like cursing before he passed it off to the virtual woman to do the actual navigation. Google: bringing the patriarchy to your digital assistants.
Yeah, I switched my launcher to Lawnchair because they put the AI button right where my right thumb would touch the search bar. It seemed like it was also by design. My launcher now looks identical to the stock launcher on the Pixel, except without an AI button.
The two greatest problems in handheld assistants is speech recognition and command integration.
Gemini solves neither of those, and I was already complaining about Google’s crappy assistant long before the LLM era lol.
I could be wrong, but why hasn’t someone just bothered gluing openai whisper to something like voice attack from elite dangerous?
I so wasn’t sold I’m not an android user anymore.
As if there are better alternatives unless you want a dumb phone.
GrapheneOS is doing fairly well right now for my needs. And I’ve been getting and supporting as many open source, privacy respecting apps as possible.
Honestly, it’s been kind of fun and heartening to learn about all of these projects that people are building because they’re passionate, driven, and want to help people. All without a stupid profit motive.
Have you had trouble with banking apps?
Not OP but i haven’t had trouble with any financial apps except Google Wallet. A few warn me that the phone isn’t secure but that’s it. Google Wallet works except for payment cards, which i wouldn’t use anyway because of the tracking.
Ive just used them by logging in on my pc on a privacy focused browser. Haven’t even tried on the phone.
Thats the attitude!
Eh, I use Gemini to project manage my little herb garden. Low stakes, well trodden ground. It was the kind of thing I knew LLMs could handle for stuff I do know about, so I’m trusting it for something I don’t know about.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if my herbs live or die, I know I’ll kill them on my own though. Gardening isn’t a skill I want to actively acquire, I just want the herbs. It (the garden) is doing fine. I had some yellow leaves, the bot said to top dress it, I did, no more yellow leaves. So far so good.
Anything beyond the well trodden LLMs are shit at though. I tried to use it to find a specific motorcycle part, discontinued by the manufacturer: it couldn’t. When I wanted it to shop for me, it failed. It seems to be doing well managing this non-commercial project for me.
