5 Things Gemini Still Can’t Do That Keep Me Paying for ChatGPT

Gemini It is the Swiss Army knife of the AI ​​world.. Backed by Google, it is available on all platforms and is deeply integrated into Android, allowing it to do things that no other chatbot can do at the moment. And the pace at which Google has caught Gemini up to its rivals is simply remarkable. That said, it often seems like ChatGPT made the most of its first-mover advantage, maintaining its lead in overall usability and responsiveness even today.

I jump between Gemini and ChatGPT throughout the day for different tasks, and use each of them quite extensively. Despite having access to all of Gemini’s capabilities through my Google AI Pro plan, I still subscribe separately to ChatGPT because Google’s AI chatbot doesn’t seem to be there yet, and here are my reasons.

There have been several cases where I would give Gemini a rather long set of instructions and it would simply skip over some of them as if they were never there. This has happened in individual chats and even within Notebooks which are supposed to bring together the context of multiple chats. I experimented with run a full expense manager within Gemini Recently, I faced this problem more than once where it simply refused to follow the instructions.

Additionally, Gemini’s scheduled tasks feature has completely given up over the past few weeks. It just didn’t run even though I gave it commands to restart the program on multiple occasions and even flipped the switch manually. I’m not sure if this is a bug or something else, but the fact is that Gemini feels like it’s still a work in progress and could use some polishing before it feels truly reliable.

I would have easily forgiven it for relatively minor hiccups, but I’ve had a much more consistent and reliable experience with ChatGPT over the last few years to put up with any issues with Gemini on the backend.

This is a bit subjective, but it matters to me a lot since I’ve been using ChatGPT for what seems like forever. It has a lot of my personal context that I have intentionally shared with him through hundreds of personal and work chats.

This is something very difficult to replicate when starting a new chatbot. And Gemini, despite its extensive Personal Intelligence capabilities across the broader Google ecosystem, hasn’t been able to do it for me so far. Gemini has a built-in tool to help you import your chats and personal context from other AI chatbots, but I never felt compelled enough to switch completely, given the reliability issues I constantly face.

Armed with Nano Banana, Gemini has been able to create and edit some notable images. However, once you’ve tried ChatGPT’s recently released image generation model, you’ll find that Google’s alternative falls quite far behind. When editing photos or generating vectors, I’ve found that 10 out of 10 times Gemini messes up the colors, even if I’ve given it specific hex codes. And it makes photos look too dull or unnecessarily bright after a simple retouching job.

While I’m not saying that ChatGPT does a flawless job like a professional photo editor would, you surely feel better if you follow my instructions and keep the color palette consistent across editing cycles side by side. Gemini feels much faster generating images, but I don’t mind waiting a minute longer to get visibly better results from ChatGPT.

Being a Google product, I automatically assumed that Gemini would be the best tool for web searchgiven how much internet data Google Search already has, but that’s surprisingly not true. In everyday life, I rely on AI tools to deliver the morning news, including a summary of all the tech news from the previous day.

Right when I start my work, both Gemini and ChatGPT are tasked with finding a certain set of websites I follow closely and giving me a quick summary of everything important I need to review. Even after my repeated prompts to put together a more detailed list that doesn’t leave out even the smallest Android tweaks, Gemini continues to miss several important pieces of information that ChatGPT picks up more consistently. It’s a shame how poor Gemini feels when it comes to getting information from the Internet in real time.

Gemini is great if you live within the Google ecosystem. Can connect with Gmail, Docs and Keep to help you with your productivity needs, and even Google Flights and Hotels to help you plan a trip on a budget. Google even has its own video generation and editing tools. However, it has yet to establish a meaningful connection with the external world, which is critical when many of us rely on various non-Google apps for everyday tasks, something ChatGPT does well.

For example, while Gemini can only help you discover music and generate playlists through YouTube Music, ChatGPT can do it on both Spotify and Apple Music. It connects with a number of third-party travel services like Expedia and Skyscanner, while also letting you use DoorDash and Uber from the app. I’m particularly a fan of its connection to Canva (which is my image editing tool), where I can simply ask ChatGPT to generate and edit things on my behalf.

Having used them quite a bit, I’ve noticed that I often consciously force myself to use Gemini for certain tasks. Whereas ChatGPT is just instinctive. It’s so embedded in my muscle memory that if an AI-worthy question pops into my head, chatgpt.com is the URL my fingers automatically type into the address bar. That says a lot about the kind of habit change Gemini will have to achieve, and I’m confident it won’t be an easy task.