The Google assistant was ok, Gemini is pure garbage. I'm sorry for your loss.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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Just deactivate all the assistants altogether. I always delete all the Google stuff from my phones and I don't think I'm missing out on anything. I have a clock app including timers, a calendar app, a notes app and a browser... What would I need an "assistant" for?
It was nice for the last many years to be able to say "hey Google, remind me in one month to give the dogs their flea meds" and then sure as shit, one month later, it told me like magic with a ding and a notification.
I wonder what happened to all the scheduled reminders I had already for months to a year from now ... Gone, I guess.
Open calendar, type in title, set to repeat monthly.
I am sorry, but... may I ask why even have any "AI" or even AI in your phone?
Why outsource your life critical/important or any responsibility on some indeterministic algorithms relying on utter undefined probability, on some vendors, and data founded on stolen now meatgrinded art, effort, actual love... of now defaced/unknown people...?
Why not stay accountable for you own life?
If you need some reminders, I would recommend the following deterministic, stable, human-written and convenient apps:
- aCalendar+ (...makes your day, week and month since over a decade...)
- AMdroid (Recurring alarms - daily or weekly repeating alarms, intervals, set expiration, etc...)
The calendar may have regular and synrchonized events from local/remote accounts.
AMdroid, in turn, may add custom actual alarms (more noticeable than basic events) based on these calendar events (e.g., matching a specific text in its description) - you won't miss it.
You realize your solutions are much more cumbersome and different than saying "hey phone, remind me that my football game starts tomorrow at 1pm", right?
It's all moot because I've disabled gemini on my phone because it is bad at the tasks I used Google Assistant for. So in the end, I just don't have an assistant app anymore.
It sounds like gemini has inadvertently done you a huge favour
Thank you for the response!
No, sorry, I don't realize what you mean, because it's less cumbersome, reliable, transparent, and I trust it.
It supports me to stay responsible for my own life.
In turn, I am in peace.
Not sure about compatibility or relevance to your soecific use-cases, but check out Dicio https://github.com/DicioTeam/dicio-android
What a cool project. That's on the way to being what I need, but it still can't do reminders. Honestly, reminders are the only thing I want because of absentmindedness. I think I'll just schedule send text messages to myself going forward. Not as simple as saying it out loud, but sending a text is pretty muscle memory at this point.