When it comes to an on-demand mobile device assistant, we don’t need the ability to have mediocre text or creepy images created for us from anywhere across Android. We need a fast, consistent, reliable system for interacting with our phone and other connected devices, getting things accomplished with our core productivity services, and getting short bursts of basic info spoken aloud to us in response to simple questions.
Google Assistant did that. It did it with a recognizable, known brand Google has spent endless energy working to build up over the past several years and a recognizable, known voice Android users have come to trust and appreciate. Throwing all of that away now to create an entirely new system that introduces out-of-place, unnecessary additions and doesn’t do the Assistant basics as effectively is a puzzling — if perfectly Googley, in the most facepalmy sense imaginable — move.
Now, polishing up Assistant, fixing its woes, and adding in Gemini as an optional add-on you could summon for its generative capabilities, if and when such a need were to arise? That could make an awful lot of sense. But positioning Gemini as a flat-out replacement for Assistant when it’s so much worse at practically everything is an awfully strange move to make — one that seems to be forcefully trying to make the wrong tool work for a very specific purpose.
So, yeah: On the one hand, Google moving closer to this more sensible-seeming setup is a welcome shift. But at the same time, the company is sticking with the current Gemini-as-a-full-fledged-Assistant-replacement path everywhere else — including, critically, on Android — which only serves to make matters even more awkward and confusing, with the complete lack of consistency from one Google product to the next.
To be clear, this isn’t just about a name. It’s about an identity — and a foundation. It’s about how people perceive, understand, and interact with this service that plays such an outsized role across Google’s entire ecosystem of platforms, products, and services.
Already, people around the world are bewildered and uncertain about what’s happening with that core part of their experience. And unfortunately, it seems that sense of confusion is only gonna get worse.