Using Gemini Live was faster than Google, but also more cumbersome

A week ago, I was on a three-day road trip when the sound in my car stopped working. From podcasts to directions, even the turn signal didn’t work. My co-driver tried desperately to find a solution using Google. It took me at least five minutes. Today, Gemini Live, the “just keep talking” version of Google’s voice assistant, took about 15 seconds to find a working solution. Of course, the moment felt magical. In The edge‘S When I first interacted with the assistant introduced today, I felt that the promised intelligence of digital assistants was finally being delivered.

But then Gemini Live just kept talking. And talking. The edge The team was crammed into a glass booth, and as Gemini Live blared on, a friendly Google employee encouraged me to “please interrupt.”

It felt weird! I don’t mind interrupting Google Assistant in my car. In fact, I can be downright abusive to most of these bots. I curse at them and interrupt them with ease. But Gemini Live felt different. The pleasantly masculine tone of voice, the casual way he spoke. It felt a little too human for me to interrupt.

My next question led to a similar interaction. I asked for ideas on how to entertain my dog, and Gemini Live just started talking. The only way I could get him to stop was to interrupt him, which I did repeatedly. It was like talking to my 9-year-old godson. Like him, Gemini Live doesn’t know how to read the signals on my face, doesn’t know when to acknowledge that I don’t actually care about the topic as much as he does.

I found myself getting more engrossed in these little interactions with Gemini Live than I found it useful as a brainstorming partner. Its ideas for my dog ​​weren’t particularly imaginative. When I interrupted it to ask how I could build a dog obstacle course in my apartment without upsetting the neighbors, it just kept spitting out more ideas. Frustrated, I accused it of explaining everything to me.

Gemini Live quickly apologized and justified its mansplaining before offering to change its tone. Embarrassed, I handed the demo over to my colleague Sean Hollister. Since he was more familiar with these bots, he had no problem interrupting them on every little thing. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t let himself be lulled into a sense of human interaction like I was. He asked it to Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and although it mixed this with his second question about investment advice, it came up with a clever hybrid idea. He asked it for stock tips, and it declined, but admired the Boglehead strategy. Then he asked it if he should invest in cryptocurrencies, and it cautioned him to be cautious, noting that it would not invest “personally.”

Sean didn’t have the issues with Gemini Live’s familiar human characteristics that I did. He had practiced with other, more human digital assistants. He was able to easily ignore social training and just demand answers. When Gemini Live comes to market, I’m curious to see how many people get hung up on the human characteristics and how many just treat it like a better-sounding Alexa.

You can judge for yourself if you have a Gemini Advanced subscription and a sufficiently powerful Android device. iOS users will have to wait a bit longer. We’re excited to compare it to OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice assistant and the smart features Apple will eventually build into Siri.