Tag: assistant
ChatGPT could become a smart personal assistant helping with everything from work to vacation planning
Google’s Gemini assistant is a fantastic and frustrating glimpse of the AI future
I don’t know how to say this, but sometimes the emotional labor of opening another app on my phone and typing in some text is just too much.
I need to gather details about an Airbnb reservation from two different confirmation emails and send them to my friends. Or I want to figure out when to leave this coffee shop to get home by a certain time via bus. These aren’t hard things to do, but they require enough tapping around different apps or tabbing between screens that I start to think, you know what? I don’t really need to send that email yet. I’ll just wing it and hope for the best with the bus schedule.
These are the jobs I would like AI to take from me. AI, including Google’s new Gemini assistant, isn’t quite up to it yet. But…
You can’t use Gemini for Android if you don’t replace Assistant
Google Bard is now Gemini as Android gets new AI assistant
Gemini will give users access to the search giant’s ‘largest and most capable’ AI model built to date.
Read more: Google Bard is now Gemini as Android gets new AI assistant
Google Bard is now Gemini as Android gets new AI assistant
Gemini will give users access to the search giant’s ‘largest and most capable’ AI model built to date.
Read more: Google Bard is now Gemini as Android gets new AI assistant
The Curious Case of the Missing Google Assistant
Job ad: Fire Group – Label Assistant (London)
Pixies apologize for sabotaging your Google Assistant alarm
For the last few years, you’ve been able to say “Stop” to tell Google Assistant to end an alarm early without the need to preface your command with “Hey Google.” It’s a handy feature Google first debuted on Assistant-enabled smart displays and speakers before later rolling it out to Pixel smartphones. And for the most part, it works like a charm, though one person recently discovered a fun quirk of the feature that involves the Pixies classic “Where Is My Mind?”
In a Reddit post spotted by Android Police, Pixel user “asevarte” recounts how their morning alarm would go off and sometimes turn off moments later for seemingly no reason. “Maybe once every other week or so, I would wake up 30 minutes later on my backup alarm, with no indication as to why the first shut itself off,” they told the Google Pixel subreddit.
Earlier this week, asevarte decided to wake up early to get to the bottom of the issue. Thankfully, it didn’t take long to find the culprit. Their alarm was set to play a Spotify playlist that features “Where Is My Mind?” If you’re a Pixies fan, you know exactly where this is going. The Surfer Rosa cut opens with bassist and vocalist Kim Deal singing “Ooh” before frontman Black Francis says, “Stop,” and the song, following a brief pause, then continues. The section caused Google Assistant to prematurely end asevarte’s alarm. They had the playlist set to shuffle, which is what made identifying the bug tricky.
Android Police recorded a video of the oversight in action, and sure enough, playing “Where Is My Mind?” ends an alarm early. Interestingly, other songs that feature a prominent “stop,” such as “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen, don’t appear to trigger Assistant’s Quick Phrases feature in the same way that “Where Is My Mind?” does. Android Police speculates the reason for that could be that in those other songs “stop” is backed by instrumentals. That lines up with complaints Assistant users have had over the years that the feature doesn’t work when they try to use it while their smart display, speaker or Pixel device is playing music.
Sorry about that! ⏰📱🛑https://t.co/EtCQ2FPkIJ
— PIXIES (@PIXIES) May 3, 2023
If you’re curious about what the Pixies think of all this. The band’s official Twitter account caught the original Android Police story. “Sorry about that!” the account tweeted.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/pixies-apologize-for-sabotaging-your-google-assistant-alarm-212914115.html?src=rss
Building a digital clone or assistant with generative AI — good idea or bad?
Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft and Cisco are clients of the author.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is moving at light speed, and we’re already beginning to see people use it to clone themselves digitally. (A Wall Street Journal writer created a digital clone that her family has been interacting with instead of her.) To reiterate how fast AI tools are progressing, the idea of creating a digital twin that could fool others was mere speculation a year ago, a sci-fi fantasy that was years, perhaps decades, in the future.