is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
Gemini has arrived on the wrist. It’s now in the latest Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 series, the Pixel Watch, and rolling out to a handful of other smartwatches. This is big. Huge, even. AI is out here disrupting life as we know it. Now, it’s making the leap from phones and laptops and onto the body. When the Galaxy Watch 8 launched, several product people told me this was going to make everything so much more convenient. Imagine, they said, having all the power of AI on you. Literally.
I’d love a more convenient, efficient life. Hands-free computing is, forgive the pun, genuinely handy. A competent, helpful AI assistant that you could interact with while on the go isn’t the worst use case for AI I’ve ever heard of.
The problem is I’ve spent the last 20-plus years of my life reaching for my phone. It’s not something I think about. It’s something I just do. I’ve also spent roughly a decade using Google Assistant. I know how to talk to Assistant. I’m acutely aware of what it can and can’t do. When I have to adjust my lights, set timers, or have a weird one-off question, I know exactly what to say and what will likely happen.
That’s not something I have with AI. Yet.
When it came time to test Gemini on the Galaxy Watch 8, I actually had to remember it was there. Even though it’s better at natural language, I froze when it came time to talk to it. My brain glitched. This isn’t Assistant! But you can still use the Hey Google command. Shit! You paused too long, and now it’s doing something awkward! Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!!
The other conundrum is knowing when and how to use Gemini on the wrist, versus Gemini on the phone, versus Gemini in your browser. At my Samsung demos, I was shown examples like, “Look up the nearest gym locations and text them to my wife,” “Start a run for the number of calories in a pizza slice,” and “Make a playlist for a 10-minute run.” When I probed reps to give other examples, some were game. Others looked at me like deer caught in headlights.
This is a question Assistant could answer. It’s also something you could look up on your phone.
Can’t say I blame them. I ran into several snags when I tried those examples for myself. I tried starting a run for the number of calories in a pizza (a totally weird metric in the first place.) Apparently, when you don’t specify the word “slice,” you get a target of 1,080 calories. For me, that’s approximately 10 miles of running. I canceled that immediately. There were only so many playlists I could prompt Gemini to make before I got the itch to make my own again. I tried having Gemini look up coffee shops and send them to various people across different messaging apps. It worked a few times. Other times, it either didn’t have access to an app like Slack, and would write out a list of 10 coffee shops. Another time, it recommended two shops forty blocks away.
It’s one thing to know Gemini is capable of more complex tasks. It’s another to know how to slot that into your life. Which is why I asked the team behind Gemini on the wrist to give me pointers.
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