I fail to see the distinction you are trying to draw.

A conversation is when you say something, and based on what you said, someone else responds to what you said, and this process repeats.

If AI can do that, how is that not a conversation?

Yes, but I don't agree with your conclusion.

You can, using your voice, ask it to navigate to a specific location. But if there are any questions or ambiguities about where you are instructing it to navigate to, it makes you use the screen to refine your choices.

This is where AI comes in. The current voice integration is very limited and prescriptive. You can only use very specific voice prompts. The minute you go off the beaten path, it falls back to screen output and touch input. That's what AI should make better.

Nope, no iPhone for me, I have the latest generation Moto G. OS and app are the latest versions available. Maybe the iPhone app has an audio-only mode that Android doesn't.

Exactly once, when I asked it to route me to a gas station, it simply adjusted my route and took me there...though it picked a gas station that was members only (Costco) and I wasn't able to get gas there as a result.

When I'm driving, I don't want to have to visually decide from a list of pins on the screen, I want to have a conversation to choose between options.

Apparently, experiences vary. I don't have the problems you have described, not ever. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I live in a large metro (Houston) where, perhaps, they spend more time making sure all the details are in the system.

Yes indeed, I'm a developer, and I have cheap Android phones (Moto G, less than $200 unlocked). Google Navigation may take a substantial amount of resources, but I can't remember it ever crashing.

You made a bunch of statements about how wrong I am, but didn't back any of them up. I guess I just have to take your word for it.

On the productivity article, yes, I sent the wrong link. Here's the right one. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/2... This happened because I used Gemini to dig for the data, and you may have heard about how great AI is at attribution (not). It got the reference links mixed up.

There are various studies that show different levels of productivity gains. I honestly don't believe the more dramatic ones. Sure, AI can write thousands of lines of code in the blink of an eye. That kind of thing would boost productivity numbers for developers, if you use metrics like number of lines of code. But are those lines of code right? No, not by a long shot. I use multiple AI developer tools and models from Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google. I have yet to see any of them get more than a few lines of code right, without having to be corrected. If vibe coding were a real thing, we'd be seeing all kinds of vibe-coded stuff in production by now.

Whatever. I've actually used AI. It's nowhere near being able to "replace" actual employees. It makes too many mistakes. It can *assist* employees, but it needs to be supervised as closely as a kid trying to do an office job.

So when companies say they are reducing headcount by implementing AI, what they are really claiming is that AI has increased the productivity of their people so much that they have been able to reduce headcount. But the actual statistics don't back up that kind of claim. MIT, for example, found that AI helped make customer service workers 14% more productive. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas.... That's great, and maybe you could argue that a 14% job cut would be "AI job losses" but that's a stretch. And customer service is a pretty ideal use case for AI, so other types of work probably see lower productivity enhancement.

That's what they'd like you to think happened, anyway.

I doubt it. Or, if they know, they know it's BS. Sure, there are probably some jobs somewhere, that have been lost to AI, but not nearly as many as claimed. Most of them were probably just using "AI" as a cover for "we're not doing well and had to lay people off."

Also, the definition of "AI job loss." How would a business determine whether a job loss is actually due to AI?

I always hated it that when I said something like, "Hey Google! Navigate to the nearest gas station along my route" it would helpfully *show* me a map of all the gas station options, expecting me to tap on the one I want and then a few more taps to add it to my route. That's the opposite of hands-free operation while driving. I would want it to ask me clarifying questions, if it had some, or offer a few choices verbally and let me speak to choose the one I want.

It seems like this new update should be able to do that.

You might have a bigger issue than just Google Maps. I've used it for years on multiple devices, and never experienced these frequent crashes.

Before you know it, these things will look like a miniature Borg cube. On the other hand, maybe we've always been wrong about Borg cubes, maybe they *are* miniature and only *look* enormous in the movies!

We've been able to access the Google Play Store for years, and download/install apps to the device of my choice. Is this functionality really not available for iPhone/iPad users?

No, not really. But I'll bet a few of those URLs were actually turned into NFTs.