Google was right when it said in Wednesday’s announcement about its new Gemini Live voice feature, “You don’t have to guess whether your task requires Spark, the Daily Brief, or a quick inbox search.” Google’s promise means that the updated Gemini app will allow you to handle various tasks through voice commands. But there’s absurdity here. Google has given all of Gemini’s AI features its own branding, which undermines its very message.
The Gemini app allows users to switch between Chat, Spark, and Daily Brief. Each of these three separate features has its own icon and is placed in the app’s navigation. This clutters what should have been a simpler consumer experience and suggests that Gemini is still struggling to find killer features.
Take the Daily Brief, for example. This feature is likely to be something that AI engineers, not ordinary users, would find clever. This is essentially an AI-enabled agenda that uses data pulled from Google apps like Gmail and Calendar to provide “proactive, personalized updates.” But in reality, briefs fail to differentiate between urgent or actionable information and unsolicited nudges to follow up on other things, like encouraging continuation of an investigation initiated by a chatbot. Even worse, it may resurface your previous Google searches.
That second part feels useless. It feels creepy. So what happens if you Google college scholarships or animal welfare? That doesn’t mean you want an AI to tap you on the shoulder about them later.
Spark has the opposite problem. This is one of the most useful aspects of the Gemini app, an AI agent that can perform actions on your behalf, but Google has packaged it as its own standalone brand, but it doesn’t have to. Sure, Google engineers may internally want to be on the Spark team, and that’s fine. But users of mainstream AI apps don’t have to wonder which “side” of the AI app they should be on for a given task. Users simply enter their requests, and the AI determines how to handle them and launches an agent if the task requires one.
To be fair, the problem isn’t limited to Geminis. The AI industry as a whole appears to be exposing its internal architecture directly to consumers rather than hiding it behind a simple interface.
Today, people have to think about whether they want to “chat” with Claude from Anthropic or “cowork” with his help. (Until this week, these two modes within the Claude app didn’t even share memories of past conversations.) ChatGPT is similar, requiring you to switch between “chat” and “work.” This is an engineering-oriented design that makes interacting with AI feel unnatural. Consumers are being asked to learn the brand names for what are essentially interaction modes or surfaces powered by companies’ AI models.
This may be why Apple’s somewhat rebellious approach to Siri may finally win over consumers. Apple device owners do not need to change their existing behavior to take advantage of this. Apple simply makes apps and features people already use smarter, like Spotlight search, the Photos app, the iPhone’s camera, and Siri voice requests, without requiring users to learn a new interface.
This same principle may also explain the rise of text-based AI services, where users simply send a text message to chatbots like Poke, Ollie, Lindy, Orchid, Lucas, Folk, Tomo, and Instinct, and the assistants do what they ask.
Text messaging has a clean, simple, and well-understood user interface that doesn’t require extra mental effort to figure out which features or products within the larger app you need to use.
Justin Moore, investment partner at a16z, recently wrote, “People don’t want to open an app every time they need help. They want a contact they can text like a friend. And the gold standard is iMessage.”
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