I’ve never been a big fan of voice assistants. I’ve had Google Assistant in my pocket for years, yet I don’t think I’ve relied on it for much more than turning on my smart lights or setting kitchen timers. Honestly, I don’t love speaking out loud to an assistant when I can get the same result with a few quick taps. So, when my colleague Rita asked me to switch from Google Assistant to Gemini and see how I got along, I put it off as long as possible. After all, if I didn’t want to talk to a robot before, why would I want to talk to one now?
As it turns out, I just needed the right kind of robot. I needed Gemini, but I needed it on the Pixel 9 series before I felt confident Google knew what it was doing. Here’s what I learned from switching assistants.