I don’t text a ton – the entities who have my number are a mix of family and apps needing 2-Factor authentication. I don’t need to sound professional in text. So: why is this the default? Why is it an assumption I’d want Gemini to help me here? How many people are struggling to finish a text? Further – how many of them somehow need help drafting a text to someone and don’t have the ability to go to ChatGPT or the Gemini app itself and draft it there? It has to be built in?
There are levels of societal expectation when it comes to texting. Firstly, most people don’t expect to be able to text a business at all, and if they can, it’s a break in the norm provided for convenience especially to them. The average person has been able to call a business for quite some time, but actually texting them is fairly new. There are also levels to the kind of access you’d expect to have at different sizes of business. A big corporation probably has the resources to maintain a text line. Many mid-sized service companies have a quiet expectation that sometimes texting your tech directly is the easiest way to reach them, but if you try to text an accountant you’re not friends with already, you might not get through. Small businesses often don’t have the people they’d need to monitor text lines, but micro-businesses, often comprised of a single person or a couple making things cottage-style, usually do, because the volume doesn’t exceed the capabilities of one person.
All this to say: a personal device capable of drafting professional-sounding texts without coming off as corny is really only suited to the smallest businesses imaginable, or the niche cases where individual employees are allowed to reply to customers, and anything else would be rendered redundant by the new standard of office phones which are capable of texting!
Gemini might, in an ideal world, be able to route stuff from your messages to your calendar for you… but on Android, you were already capable of doing that! The phone was already able to do that for you! Do you need Gemini’s help drafting up texts? Maybe. Maybe there’s a use case for the disabled, people who forget to send texts because they get so anxious during the writing, people with dyslexia, people who suffer from brain fog and can’t formulate a thought eloquently in text when dealing with some delicate problem, et cetera. This is not a slight to them. Needing help is not something to be ashamed of. In fact, the disabled needing help often forces websites to do things that make them more usable for everyone else, in what’s called ‘the curb cut effect’. However, Gemini’s presence here is not a curb-cut. It’s a slight to The Android OS, which apparently pictures a userbase almost entirely comprised of helpless users lacking the imagination to phrase a break-up text or a friend meetup without an AI helping them, and give up rather than letting themselves put something mediocre out into a groupchat. The need for such a product built in and opt out feels manufactured at best. Most likely, they’re hoping that putting the choice there as an opt-out encourages people to use it (and large companies are hoping LLMs and virtual assistants take off for a number of reasons, not all of which benefit the customer) rather than responding to real-life demand. Which often is ‘I wish they’d stop changing things on me’.
(If you’d like help with integrating AI smoothly into your business, get in touch with us: https://elixistechnology.com/contact/)
