I just got Gemini on my Google Home and Nest speakers, and I'd like a refund

Gemini for Google Home has been rolling out for many months, but I wasn’t lucky enough to get it because I live in France. Despite doing all the sign-ups for the Preview program and using Assistant, Gemini, and all my speakers in US English for a decade now, the rollout didn’t make it to my four smart speakers and hubs. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Google announced it was expanding availability to some European countries, and I finally got to experience Gemini on my speakers.

And it has been horrible.

Why is Gemini on Google Home and Nest Hub so slow?

It’s been months now that my smart Google speakers (two Nest Audios, one Nest Hub second generation, and one Pixel Tablet) have been misbehaving. I speak at a normal voice level in a room with a Nest Audio, and the Hub downstairs, far away from me, answers instead. Or, worse, all speakers around the house answer. I ask it to set a timer, but it spins endlessly and doesn’t answer.

My internet connection is, on average, above 500Mbps, and I have solid Wi-Fi 6 routers that handle connections between all my devices very well. There’s no reason that these speakers should’ve been misbehaving. And then I switched to Gemini, and I discovered that my previous issues were kids’ play. Gemini on smart speakers is terrible.

Everything is slooooooooooow now. I have to have the patience of a tourist chilling on a beach in Cancun if I want to ask any questions. Gemini takes forever to listen, forever to transcribe what I said, and forever to answer. By the time it has decided to set my timer, I could’ve gone on Amazon, bought a small timer clock, got it delivered to my home, and manually set it up. I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea. Weather questions take more time than finding my phone around the house, pulling up the Pixel Weather app, and looking at the forecast. And forget about anything more complex. It’s an endless wait.

On top of this, the issue with speakers answering together or the wrong speakers picking up the command is more pervasive than ever. In a day with on average 10-15 commands, I think two or three get answered by the speaker that’s closest to me. I’m tired of telling Google, “No, this was the wrong speaker.” Even worse is when they all listen and then none of them answers. Endless thinking, leaving me waiting with bated breath, and then… silence?! How?!

The unpredictability of answers is beyond annoying

Dealing with Gemini on my smart speakers has also proven to be a frustrating experience due to the unpredictability of its answers. Assistant was pretty cut-and-dry; it had a very specific way of answering questions about the weather, calendar, sports scores, setting timers, controlling my smart home, and so on. I knew exactly how long it was going to talk for and when it was going to say the important information I needed.

With Gemini, it’s a coin toss. It can be chatty, it can be succinct, and it can use any sentence structure it damn pleases. Fun for the first day or two when you discover it has “more character” than Assistant, but it gets exhausting pretty quickly. Will it give me a long answer? A short one? When will it tell me the temperature, at the start or the end of its answer? Will it ask me for more details to set up my calendar event or not? Will it immediately tell me if the front door is locked, or will it go the long-winded way before answering? None of it is predictable.

I asked it for the score of Real Madrid’s last game, and it just gave me the score. When I asked the same question about Barcelona’s last game, it launched into a description of how thrilling the game was, who scored, and finally gave me the score. That’s not a good experience. No matter how “human,” Google wants Gemini to be, some answers should be hardcoded in the system so they don’t vary this wildly, especially when I’m not trying to have a conversation with my speaker, but just need it to give me some precise info.

Gemini on smart speakers is very interesting, but it’s far from ready

Look, not all is bad with my Gemini experience on my Google Home and Nest speakers. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had several instances where I had to go, “Oh, this is so much better than Assistant!”

One of them, for example, was when I asked it to add avocado to my shopping list and it told me there was already avocado on my list. Assistant used to create duplicates and triplicates of items, never noticing that they were already there. I’ve also been able to ask more intricate questions about the weather, like, “Will it rain on Saturday or Sunday afternoon in Paris?” Assistant could only focus its answer on one day. “When is Real Madrid’s next game, and do I have something on my calendar that day?” That’s another question Assistant was never able to parse fully.

More open-ended questions also get me more interesting answers. “I don’t have cilantro, what can I replace it with?” no longer gets me a boring, “On the website xyz.com, they say…” It actually answers the question. There are countless examples like that where having a smarter, more capable voice assistant is much more helpful than the limited Assistant.

Gemini Live is also amazing to try on a speaker. It’s just nice to say, “Hey Google, let’s talk,” and have it switch into this mode without having to take out my phone to trigger it, and without having to press a button to end the chat. This is, by far, my favorite aspect of having Gemini on my speakers — impromptu discussions with multiple back-and-forths.

So, I see the vision with Gemini; I just don’t see the execution. Google had a couple of years to get this working; it had even more to get Assistant to become reliable, and yet here we are, still at a Preview phase with dreadfully slow and unpredictably different answers. Will the new Google Home speaker hardware fix this? Maybe, maybe not. But if we’re still fighting to get the right speaker to answer us, then we’re not out of the woods yet. And Google’s track record in fixing things instead of launching new ones is pathetic.