Google Gemini Is Conversationally Precocious, But Still Awkward
Alex Cranz, writing for The Verge:
But then Gemini Live kept talking. And talking. The Verge team was
packed in a glass booth, and as Gemini Live droned on, a friendly
Google employee encouraged me to “go ahead and interrupt it.”
It felt weird! I don’t mind interrupting Google Assistant in my
car. In fact, I can be downright abusive to most of these bots. I
call them names and interrupt them with ease. But Gemini Live felt
different. The pleasing masculine tone of the voice, the easy way
it spoke. It felt a little too human for me to interrupt.
My next question led to a similar interaction. I asked for ideas
on how to entertain my dog, and Gemini Live just started talking.
The only way I could get it to stop was to interrupt it. Which I
did repeatedly. It was like talking to my 9-year-old godson. Like
him, Gemini Live doesn’t know how to read the cues on my face,
doesn’t know when to acknowledge that, actually, I don’t care as
much about the subject at hand as it does.
The comparison to a 9-year-old is apt. There’s no path to LLM assistants not being socially awkward without going through stages of sometimes-embarrassing awkwardness.
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Alex Cranz, writing for The Verge:
But then Gemini Live kept talking. And talking. The Verge team was
packed in a glass booth, and as Gemini Live droned on, a friendly
Google employee encouraged me to “go ahead and interrupt it.”
It felt weird! I don’t mind interrupting Google Assistant in my
car. In fact, I can be downright abusive to most of these bots. I
call them names and interrupt them with ease. But Gemini Live felt
different. The pleasing masculine tone of the voice, the easy way
it spoke. It felt a little too human for me to interrupt.
My next question led to a similar interaction. I asked for ideas
on how to entertain my dog, and Gemini Live just started talking.
The only way I could get it to stop was to interrupt it. Which I
did repeatedly. It was like talking to my 9-year-old godson. Like
him, Gemini Live doesn’t know how to read the cues on my face,
doesn’t know when to acknowledge that, actually, I don’t care as
much about the subject at hand as it does.
The comparison to a 9-year-old is apt. There’s no path to LLM assistants not being socially awkward without going through stages of sometimes-embarrassing awkwardness.