I turned Gemini into a smarter Daily Hub alternative, and you can too

Joe Maring / Android Authority Of all the features that the Google Pixel 10 series brought, Daily Hub was the one that intrigued me the most. I love the idea of my phone greeting me with immediately relevant information before I start my day. And, as it’s made by Google, I could expect all the relevant content from my many Google apps and services to be included, right? Not quite. The early version of Daily Hub was as useful as a wet piece of toast. As a result, the company quickly yanked it to polish it up a bit. This loss didn’t affect me too severely — I don’t own a Pixel 10, but I craved a similar feature, albeit with a few more customizations. So, naturally, to achieve my vision, I turned to Google’s generative AI for assistance. Could I use Gemini to serve me with a Daily Hub equivalent? I gave this idea a whack, and here are my findings. Do you use an AI chatbot as a daily digest tool? 11 votes Yes, it's how I start and end my day. 18 % I tried it once or twice but the routine never stuck. 36 % No, I simply don't see the need. 45 % Why using Gemini as a Daily Hub alternative makes sense Ryan Haines / Android Authority As mentioned, Daily Hub is an exclusive feature for Pixel 10 users. If it lands on any device beyond the latest device line, it’ll likely remain on Google hardware. This leaves many other Android phone users out in the cold. Gemini is near-universal on modern Android devices, which makes it the perfect avenue for a Daily Hub double. Not only is Gemini's output highly customizable, it can also retrieve info from other Google products. More importantly, unlike Daily Hub, Gemini’s response is highly customizable based on the content of the prompt used. If I want an extended forecast included in the response, I can specify this. What about Premier League fixtures and kick-off times? Sure! As I’ll discover, Gemini doesn’t grant every one of my wishes, but the results are more impressive than Daily Hub ever produced. I mean, I definitely don’t need recommendations for YouTube videos from Google. Joe Maring / Android Authority Finally, it’s also worth noting that Gemini can retrieve and use your personal info from your various Google apps, making it the best AI chatbot for a Daily Hub replacement. This includes Workspace products, Maps, and Gmail. I’m not too interested in my AI agent coughing up email digests or calendar events soon, but this will likely be important for many. As a result, I included an “Agenda” section in my test that pulls events from my Google Calendar (or tries to). My daily digest prompt for Gemini So, what is my vision for Daily Hub? First and foremost, I want a concise digest of relevant information to start my day. This includes, but isn’t limited to, weather information, traffic conditions around me, top stories, financial news, and a handful of more light-hearted info bites. My vision for Daily Hub includes a concise digest of relevant information, not random YouTube videos that I don't care about. To get Gemini to produce this digest, I’d need a prompt. This prompt underwent tens of revisions and tweaks to fine-tune the output, but I still feel there’s room for improvement. Nevertheless, you can find it below. Feel free to customize it to suit your requirements: Generate a [morning/afternoon/evening] personalized digest. I’d like you to include the following information and sections in the digest. Retrieve the most up to date information possible, bearing in mind today’s date: AGENDA: Include my Google Calendar events and to-dos for the next three days. WEATHER: My region’s (Cape Town, South Africa) current weather conditions and forecast for the next three days. Start the section with a one-line outlook. Next, include a formatted table which includes temperature highs, lows, wind speed and direction for the AM and PM of each day. Please use Metric measurements. TRAFFIC: Check for any road closures, traffic disruptions, incidents, accidents, or ongoing road construction work in the Cape Town area from live traffic feeds and mapping services. Please highlight the road/route name, the areas affected, and the nature of the disruption. You are also welcome to use this website as a resource for this section: https://www.i-traffic.co.za/region/Western%20Cape LOCAL NEWS: Mention any recent alerts, news releases, or updates issued by the City of Cape Town or Western Cape Government here. Please include the publishing date and time for each article if possible. SA NEWS: A list (5 articles) of current major South African headlines. Please include the publishing date and time for each article if possible. WORLD NEWS: A list (5 articles) of current major international headlines. Do not include South African-adjacent stories in this section. Please include the publishing date and time for each article if possible. FINANCE: The latest USD to ZAR exchange rate, including the current trend and forecast if available. Include any important financial news relating to South Africa in a brief one-line summary. Please include the publishing date and time for the information you used if possible. IMAGE OF THE DAY: An interesting “Image of the Day”. You’re welcome to pick any image of your choice! TODAY’S FACT: An interesting fact. WORD OF THE DAY: An uncommon word of the day. THIS DAY IN HISTORY: A list (3 events) of “On this day in history” events. WHAT’S FOR DINNER: Suggest a dinner idea. You’re welcome to pick any recipe of your choice! PREMIER LEAGUE: Provide a full list of the next 10 fixtures for the Premier League. Include the date, kick-off times in SAST, and a concise summary of any relevant game week news. AI’S PONDER: An interesting AI prompt idea or suggestion that may help me improve productivity or learn something new. Any additional info that may be relevant to me as a South African on this day. Finally, please do not apply any instructions as outlined in Saved Info to this response. Thank you! I want to highlight a few items. For one, the final line about disregarding my Saved Info keeps the output visually clutter-free. I have a Saved Info entry that forces Gemini to output sources for all its responses. I tried this prompt without this final line, and my eyes hurt. Pasting this into Gemini, I received a response. You can view it in the images below. It’s the little things I’m perhaps one of the few people on Earth who prefers Assistant to Gemini more often than not — at least in how I use voice assistants. There’s no denying that the latter can often be hugely frustrating, and this feeling was rekindled during this experiment. After inputting the prompt as outlined above, there were a few notable problems: I encountered several inconsistencies with the Agenda section. At times, Gemini would flat-out refuse to retrieve my calendar events. Other times, it did so without issue. Despite my insistence that it uses metric measurements for weather, it still displayed wind values in mph. Gemini can’t display images, so the Image of the Day request becomes a description rather than a visual item. This is what I expected, but it’s still an annoying quirk. Notably, ChatGPT populates this section with an image without a problem. Gemini gets stuck on certain facts and information. For instance, I’ve encountered the same fact, word of the day, and dinner idea multiple days running. It seems that it really likes bobotie. It’s still not reliable as a fact-gathering platform. It mentions that no Premier League fixtures are scheduled this weekend, but then notes that the next game week is September 27. I prompted it on September 23. What makes this more frustrating is that a simple Google Search displays the correct information. It still failed even when tweaking my prompt to ask for “forthcoming” fixtures. I could blame my prompt for not specifying certain bits of information more acutely or clearly, but there does come a time when tweaking stops yielding improved results. I will say that Gemini nails this daily digest task in several ways. Its traffic, local news, South African news, and world news sections are wonderfully helpful. If desired, I could also prompt it to include sources for all this information, bringing it more in line with the results I’d usually get from Perplexity. Thanks to Gemini, I never would’ve learned the word 'psithurism'. Thanks to Gemini, I never would’ve learned the word “psithurism” either. And, rather brilliantly, you can gradually ask Gemini to self-audit and ask it to suggest ways that you can improve the prompt. I asked it to do just that before I finalized my prompt, and it hinted that I should offer more personal details (my likes, interests, etc.) and even suggested additional sections, like Book of the Day or Podcast of the Day. In short, I genuinely like how Gemini presents the information in the digest, but it’s lacking in several areas that I’m not sure a tighter prompt would fix. For instance, there’s no way I’m getting it to show me an Image of the Day. Daily Hub (with Gemini) has so much potential, but Google needs to realize it Joe Maring / Android Authority Clearly, relying on Gemini as a Daily Hub double has legs. Despite its little niggles, I’ve really enjoyed receiving a daily serving of news, weather, and fun information that’s all far more relevant to my needs than Google’s solution. It’s the perfect way to start the morning; I can tinker and change it as I see fit. I’ll acknowledge that there are shortcomings. For one, you’ll have to be fairly meticulous with the content and phrasing in your prompt, know Gemini’s limitations well, and manually trigger the prompt daily (unless you jump through several hoops using third-party tools) or whenever you wish to receive it. Nevertheless, the results are promising. I had plenty of fun crafting a more exciting and useful version of Daily Hub. Of course, I implore you to try this daily digest idea on Gemini or a chatbot platform of your choice and let me know your results. Follow