Rushil Agrawal / Android Authority
Ever since ChatGPT started gaining in popularity, every other tech company has been rushing to keep up with its advancements in generative AI. Although some might argue that OpenAI’s chatbot is still on top, the company that I believe has come closest to surpassing it is Google. After Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a “code red” in December 2022 to meet the threat OpenAI represented, the company has created a powerful, robust, and wide-reaching set of AI-powered tools that offer tangible benefits for its users.
Circle to Search, for example, is probably one of the best software products Google has created since the launch of Google Photos in 2015. The Pixel-exclusive Recorder app is an AI-powered utility that has made my life so much easier. And Google’s Gemini chatbot has proven itself to be a terrific ChatGPT competitor — I use Gemini far more than ChatGPT, for what it’s worth.
The problem Google faces now, though, is that it’s been so desperate to beat the competition that it’s been forced to leave an organizational mess behind in its wake. This issue is something the company needs to make serious strides to rectify soon if it wants to stay on top of the heap.
Google’s AI tools need a centralized location
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
To help illuminate the problem Google has made for itself, let me ask you this seemingly simple question: Does that amazing restaurant you visited in October 2023 have outdoor seating? If you have a great memory, this is likely easy to answer. However, if you’re like me and have a terrible memory for things like this, figuring out the answer is not so simple.
Let’s break this down into steps. I first need to figure out where I was. Usually, I would go to Google Maps and use Timeline to deduce my visited places in October 2023, but Timeline is dead, and I switch phones so much that I can’t keep mine alive, so that’s out. Google Photos would be my next best bet. Assuming I took a photo at the restaurant, I could use the AI-powered search feature to find pictures of food from October 2023, and that would at least let me know the general location of where I was. Once I have that down, I could then go to Google Maps and hope that one of the restaurant names near the photo’s location would jog my memory. Finally, a quick query in the AI-powered info search there would let me know if there is outdoor seating.
AI is supposed to make things faster and easier, but a seemingly simple question about a restaurant I visited still takes multiple app searches to answer.
That’s a whole lot of steps to do something that one search bar should be able to handle on its own. The problem, though, is that no “universal” search bar exists that can perform all these functions for me. I certainly can’t just go to Google.com or use the Google app, as they don’t have any connectivity to my personal information. Even the main Gemini app — which links directly to my accounts in Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Drive, and more — couldn’t help me with this query. In fact, rather than access my information from any of the connected Google apps to help me deduce this, it simply hallucinated three French restaurants (I visited zero French restaurants in October 2023 and haven’t been to France since 2019):
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