The funny thing is there's no reason for it to be so shitty just because they use Gemini for it. LLMs can use tools if given access. There's no reason they can't give it a tool to use intents to launch activities. I can run their own open weight Gemma model in llama.cpp and I'm pretty sure it can call tools.

Lately I feel like Google or Microsoft could pay me like a million a year and I could single-handedly fix their most broken products and the AI doesn't even have to go. Teams? Don't care how much tracking they put in it, it can be made more performant and the UI can be made usable. Gemini? Could legitimately be fixed to do everything the old Google assistant did and more. Outlook though? Yeah that one has to go. No saving it anymore.