Believe it or not, it’s now been a full three years since Google’s Gemini assistant took its incredibly awkward and painfully premature first steps into the world.

Google announced Gemini — known as Bard, at the time — in February of 2023. (In a classic Google move, the Gemini moniker came into the mix several months later, initially as the name of a “model” powering Bard, then took over as the brand of the whole kit and caboodle a few months later.)

To say it’s been a rocky road since then would be the understatement of the century. Google has crammed Gemini into our faces at every given opportunity in a move reminiscent of the Google+ mess, often while it was still too half-baked to be effective and all while creating endless confusion between Gemini and the Google Assistant platform it’s (slowly) replacing on Android — and beyond.

And that’s to say nothing, of course, of the confidently asserted misinformation Gemini — like most every other large-language model system out there — consistently serves up. Plain and simple, these systems get facts wrong shockingly often, which is a major liability for business and an even more unthinkable issue for society. And yet, Google and its contemporaries behind other similar systems continue trying to convince us this technology is the end-all answer for everything and an on-demand answer engine ready to replace traditional search as our source for any and all knowledge.

Despite (insert huge breath here) all of that, as I’ve been contemplating Gemini’s three-year anniversary, I’ve been struck by a bit of an epiphany — an explanation of why, exactly, having Gemini squeezed into so many corners of our lives feels like such an irritating imposition, even in spite of the growing list of genuinely useful possibilities Gemini now adds into the Android environment and the ways it can legitimately be helpful in other more limited, specific scenarios.

With Google’s annual I/O conference now right around the corner and even more Gemini jibber-jabber sure to be splorched upon us soon, it’s a prime time to step back and ponder what the real foundational flaws are, at this point in Gemini’s evolution, and why they’ll be such a challenge for Google to address.

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Gemini’s simplest struggles

Let’s start on the surface: The biggest problem with Gemini today is actually the same one we talked about this same time two years ago — and that’s that Gemini just isn’t a very good assistant, when it comes to the simple sorts of help most average Android device owners (and other Google-connected device users) actually want and need in their day-to-day lives.

A part of me assumed that all of Google’s progress with Gemini these past couple years would have changed things more dramatically. But as I’ve been talking to my fellow Android appreciators over the months and thinking about all the ways Gemini falls short in my own life, I’ve realized that that very same shortcoming is still as glaring as can be.

And the real-world examples, from my own personal experiences and those of folks who have chatted with me about their frustrations, (a) are seemingly endless — and (b) mostly all come down to the same core theme of the service being harder to use and simultaneously less useful than its predecessor.

For instance:

• ‘Twasn’t long ago that Google made a huge frickin’ deal about the ability to use “continued conversation” with Assistant — on supported Android devices as well as various Google/Nest smart speakers and displays. That meant you could say something like “Hey Google, what’s the weather?” — then, after it answers, simply follow up with “What about this weekend?” Gemini can’t do that with a hands-free interaction, and what’s more, it won’t remember the context of your previous conversation and understand a follow-up question like that even if you go out of your way to say “Hey Google” and wake it up again.
• Speaking of the weather, trying to get Gemini to answer basic but specific weather questions — like “When is it going to rain today?” — is an exercise in aggravation. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone in my household has tried to coerce such info out of a Gemini device and eventually just given up and looked up the forecast themselves. Considering most real people rely on services like this for finding out the weather more than anything, that’s a pretty damning downgrade.
• Gemini’s control of connected devices — lights, thermostats, and so on — is maddeningly inconsistent and exasperating to the point where many humans I hear from have just stopped trying to bother with it altogether.
• Want to start a simple stopwatch on your allegedly smart Google-connected display — y’know, the kind of thing you might do regularly when using such a device in your office or maybe kitchen? Good luck with that: Gemini, for reasons unknown, can’t handle it.
• While Gemini, like Assistant before, will remember most any fact you tell it — a power that can absolutely be handy — the once-useful ability to tell your Android phone to remember where you parked and then later navigate back to that location is confoundingly now absent in our Gemini universe. (Gemini will just remember whatever you tell it as a plain-text fact, without the actually-helpful Maps integration and instant navigation option.)
• On a related note, the long-helpful ability to set reminders connected to a specific location — so your reminder will pop up the next time you arrive at said spot? Yeah, not so much anymore, with Gemini in the picture.
• Need to do anything without an active internet connection? Not gonna happen: Gemini can function only when it’s online, rendering it completely useless when you’re somewhere without a signal.

And all of that’s still just the start.

The broader Gemini flaws

Beyond any number of specific shortcoming examples is the indisputable fact that Gemini just tends to be slow, inconsistent, and unreliable as a basic virtual assistant compared to the system it’s replacing. So while, yes, it can do all sorts of whizbang parlor tricks like creating fake images and videos, generating 30-second “songs” on command, and acting as your chatty companion for all those moments when you’re just dying to talk to a computer at length, it more often than not feels like a step backwards at the tasks that actually matter — the simple sorts of things most of us actually want a virtual assistant to handle when we ask.

And, again, all of that’s to say nothing of the deeply troubling issue of accuracy and being able to rely on any info Gemini gives you as an on-demand assistant. Whether you’re asking about your calendar or asking for broader world knowledge, interact with Gemini or any other LLM chatbot enough — and pay careful enough attention to the responses it’s giving you — and you will see instances where it’s flat-out making stuff up and presenting those inaccuracies to you as fact.

As I wrote early on in the AI chatbot craze, when it comes to online interactions, getting something right even 90% of the time isn’t good enough. Accuracy and thoroughness matter. One simple answer is fine — when it’s right. And when you can trust that it’s right.

If even one out of every 10 attempts at using something produces a flawed or for any reason unsatisfactory result, folks tend to lose faith in said thing pretty fast. And they then end up turning to another tool for the same purpose. More than a couple rare misses here and there, and it’s just not worth the effort for most mere mortals.

Studies of AI chatbots’ accuracy rates vary — which in and of itself likely speaks to the sheer inconsistency of these systems, even when asked the same exact thing multiple times — but look around, and you’ll have a tough time finding many reports suggesting that these systems get things right even 90% of the time. Most estimates are much, much worse.

And all it takes is a single unnoticed inaccuracy or errant action to send you down a deep, dark path — be it personally or professionally. Just ask the Meta director of AI safety (!) who accidentally allowed an AI agent to delete her inbox the other day. Or ask the folks behind a conference about AI (!!) that found dozens of “hallucinated citations” in papers it had accepted. Or ask the National Weather Service, whose AI-generated weather predictions recently included completely made-up fake town names like “Orangeotild” and “Whata Bod” (and crazy as it sounds, I swear I’m not making that up).

The list just keeps going. And going. And going.

So while Google now wants us to trust Gemini with even more complicated tasks — like ordering a ride or assisting with online shopping, both of which launched as limited beta features for certain devices this week — it’s tough to see how that’s gonna be consistently and reliably trustworthy enough to actually be advisable or even just tolerable to use in the real world. (Have you seen how this same sort of feat has been going with Chrome’s recently-rolled-out in-browser equivalent?)

And, more pressingly, the much simpler and more table-stakes ways in which most of us actually want to have an assistant help us are still frustratingly incomplete and unpredictable, three full years into Gemini’s existence.

I interact with an awful lot of Android phone owners and folks who are heavily immersed in the Google ecosystem, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered anyone who genuinely feels that things are better now with Gemini than they were with Assistant before. On the contrary, almost all of my interactions in this area come down to complaints about how much worse the virtual assistant experience has gotten in the measures that matter and how the places where Gemini does offer something new tend to range from “mildly amusing for a little while” to “more troubling than promising, in terms of the long-term implications.”

After three years and a dizzying amount of over-the-top hype, the biggest questions in my mind are simply: Did anyone actually ask for this? And, more pressingly: Is this the future we wanted?

Outside of Google’s walls and the greater tech industry arena, I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find many emphatic yeses.

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