Why is Google killing its Assistant before Gemini is ready to handle the basics?

Google’s AI assistant Gemini can write you an entire essay, summarize a PDF, and hold a full conversation about your vacation plans. But ask it to set a kitchen timer, and there’s a decent chance it’ll tell you it failed, even when it actually worked. That’s the kind of problem that makes you wonder if Google is rushing the future before the present is ready.

Gemini is fumbling one of the most basic assistant tasks

As we recently covered, Pixel and Android users have been running into a frustrating bug where Gemini shows a false “Action failed” error after setting an alarm or timer. The alarm or timer actually gets created in the Clock app just fine, however, Gemini times out waiting for a confirmation signal from Clock, assumes something went wrong, and tells you it didn’t work.
Google has acknowledged this as a “known issue,” which is at least something. The official workaround is to go into your Gemini settings and toggle…