Gemini Live could use some more rehearsals
Gemini Live, Google's answer to OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode, is now available. But it needs some serious work.
What’s the point of chatting with a human-like bot if it’s an unreliable narrator — and has a colorless personality?
That’s the question I’ve been turning over in my head since I began testing Gemini Live, Google’s take on OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode, last week. Gemini Live is an attempt at a more engaging chatbot experience — one with realistic voices and the freedom to interrupt the bot at any point.
Gemini Live is “custom-tuned to be intuitive and have a back-and-forth, actual conversation,” Sissie Hsiao, GM for Gemini experiences at Google, told TechCrunch in May. “[It] can provide information more succinctly and answer more conversationally than, for example, if you’re interacting in just text. We think that an AI assistant should be able to solve complex problems … and also feel very natural and fluid when you engage with it.”
After spending a fair amount of time with Gemini Live, I can confirm that it is more free-flowing and natural-feeling than Google’s previous attempts at AI-powered voice interactions (see: Google Assistant). But it doesn’t address the problems of the underlying tech, like hallucinations and inconsistencies — and it introduces a few new ones.
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