If it wasn’t clear before that Google’s Gemini chatbot was rushed out the door, it is now.
Gemini’s since-removed image generator put people of color in Nazi-era uniforms. Chatbot commentary continues to veer toward the absurd, like equating Hitler’s meme-posting record with Elon Musk.
On Android, Gemini also breaks Google Assistant’s song recognition. And to me, after Gemini’s disgusting cultural insensitivity, it’s one of the most disappointing things about it.
Let me explain.
I mostly use Gemini on my old Samsung Galaxy A53 5G, which isn’t exactly the sharpest Android smartphone out there. To make it easier to use, I replaced the default home screen with a minimalist alternative, the Niagara Launcher, which is essentially an alphabetical list of the apps installed on my phone.
Niagara is great. But it’s limited in what it can do by design, which has left me dependent on Google Assistant — now Gemini — for tasks like setting a timer, launching apps, and so on.
Song recognition, prompted with a command like “OK Google, what’s that song?”, was a convenience I often took advantage of with Google Assistant. It was useful in nightclubs, restaurants and bars for recognizing tracks that I would surely forget otherwise. There’s no shortage of song recognition apps—Apple-owned Shazam to name one. But Google Assistant was one of the best out there in terms of accuracy, at least in my experience.
So imagine my dismay when I discovered that Gemini on Android can’t recognize songs — or even perform the basic task of funneling song ID requests to Google Assistant.
Ask Gemini, which replaces Google Assistant on Android, to identify a song and it does nerve to suggest using apps like Shazam — or invoking Google Assistant by returning to it. For more variety, it will occasionally recommend random songs from YouTube.
Image Credits: Google
I am well aware that this is a first world problem. I could start identifying songs from the Google Search app on Android. Or, if I was using a conventional home screen, I could put the dedicated Song ID shortcut.
But the other aspect of Google Assistant’s song recognition that made it so appealing, at least to this writer, was its low barrier to use. Getting it up and running didn’t require fiddling with an app or typing anything. One voice command later and it was up and running, which made it fast — useful when you’re trying to quickly identify a song.
Making the song recognition situation more disheartening is the fact that I pay for the Google One AI Premium Plan, priced at $20 per month, which is supposed to give me access to a more evolved, powerful Gemini experience. Maybe it’s complicated but ways — ways I haven’t discovered yet, honestly. But broken song recognition, along with missing key features like the ability to play songs, create playlists, and more, make Gemini a very poor replacement for Google Assistant on Android right now.
Full disclosure, I have contacted Google about song recognition through Gemini and will update this post if I hear back.
