Google’s Gemini assistant is a fantastic and frustrating glimpse of the AI future

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Phone in hand showing Google Gemini welcome screen.
Gemini has all the conversational grace of a page of search results. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
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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…

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