Google’s Gemini has a branding problem, and so does the rest of AI

Подробности

Google gets something right in its Wednesday announcement about new Gemini Live voice features when it says, “You shouldn’t have to guess whether a task requires Spark, a Daily Brief, or a quick inbox search.” Google means that as a promise — that the updated Gemini app can handle a variety of tasks via voice commands. But there’s a ridiculousness here: Google has given every Gemini AI feature under the sun its own branding, which undercuts that very message.

In the Gemini app, users can switch between chat, Spark, and Daily Brief — three separate features, each with its own icon and place in the app’s navigation. This clutters up what could otherwise be a more straightforward consumer experience, and it suggests that Gemini is still struggling to find a killer feature.

Take Daily Brief, for example. The feature comes across as the kind of thing an AI engineer, not an everyday user, would think is clever. It’s essentially an AI-enabled agenda that offers “proactive, personalized updates” using data pulled from Google’s apps, like Gmail and Calendar. In practice, though, the Brief can’t tell the difference between information that’s urgent or actionable and unsolicited nudges to follow up on other things — like prompting you to continue research you started in the chatbot, or worse, resurfacing your prior Google searches.

That second part doesn’t feel useful; it feels creepy. So what if I had been researching college scholarships or animal rescues on Google? That doesn’t mean I want an AI tapping me on the shoulder about them later.

Spark has the opposite problem. It’s one of the more useful aspects of Gemini’s app — an AI agent that can take action on your behalf — but Google has packaged it as its own standalone brand, which it doesn’t need to be. Sure, internally, Google engineers may want to be on the Spark team, and that’s fine — but a mainstream AI app user definitely does not need to think about which “side” of the AI app they need to be in for a given task. They should just be able to type their request, and the AI figures out how to handle it, spinning up an agent if the task calls for one.