Google Gemini’s new Calendar capabilities bring you one step closer to your ultimate personal assistant
Google’s next-generation generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, Gemini, will soon be able to access events scheduled in Google Calendar on Android phones.
According to 9to5GoogleCalendar events were on Gemini Experiences Senior Director of Product Management at Google Jack Krawczyk’s list of things that need to be fixed ASAP for what Google would like to add to Gemini to make it a better equipped digital assistant.
Users who have the Gemini app on an Android device can now expect Gemini to respond to voice or text prompts such as “Show me my calendar” and “Do I have any upcoming calendar events?” When 9to5Google tried this the week before, Gemini responded that it couldn’t fulfill these types of requests and queries – which was especially notable because these types of requests are quite common among competing (non-AI) digital assistants like Siri or Google Assistant. However, when the same prompts were tried this week, Gemini opened the Google Calendar app and complied with the requests. It seems that if users want to enter a new event using Gemini, you’ll need to tell them something like “Add an event to my calendar” and then ask the user to fill in the details manually using voice commands.
Go all in for Gemini
Google is clearly making progress in establishing Gemini as its own all-in-one AI offering (including as a digital assistant, replacing Google Assistant in the future). It takes quite a few steps before it can do that, with users asking for features like the ability to play music or edit their shopping lists through Gemini. Another major obstacle that Gemini must overcome if it wants to become popular is that it is only available in the United States for now.
The race to become the best AI assistant has gotten a little more intense lately between Microsoft with Copilot, Google with Gemini, and Amazon with Alexa. Google recently made some pretty big strides in its ability to compress the larger Gemini models so they could run on mobile devices. The capabilities of these more complex models sound like they could give Gemini’s capabilities a big boost. Google Assistant is quite widely recognized and this is another feather in Google’s cap. I’m hesitant to place a bet on either of these AI digital assistants, but if Google continues with Gemini at this rate, I think the odds are pretty good.