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469 points bundie | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.412s | source
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jeroenhd ◴[] No.44502053[source]
Google has been working on this since November last year going by the wayback archive of the support page for this feature.

I'm not seeing any indication that Gemini can read your messages, though. You can compose messages and start calls, but I can't get it to read me any of my messages. In fact, I can't even get it to send messages to group chats, only to individual contacts.

The feature makes a lot of sense, of course. WhatsApp is to many countries across the globe what texting and calling is to Americans. If your smart assistant can't even interact with WhatsApp, it's basically useless for many people.

Edit: ah, that explains why I can't make Gemini read my messages to me, Google's own documentation (https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/15574928) says it can't:

    What Gemini can’t do with WhatsApp
    
        Read or summarize your messages
        Add or read images, gifs, or memes in your messages
        Add or play audio or videos in your messages
        Read or respond to WhatsApp notifications
If you connected Google Assistant to WhatsApp, it seems like data may flow that direction, but then you've already hooked WhatsApp into Google before so I don't think anyone will be surprised there.

Does anyone know how I can make Gemini read messages? I can't even find the assistant settings necessary for that stuff to function.

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Hizonner ◴[] No.44502286[source]
What Gemini should be able to do with WhatsApp:

    Exactly and only what any other random app on the phone could do
    with WhatsApp, assuming that you have enabled that in exactly the
    way you would have to enable any other random app to do it.
Google needs to not be abusing its position as the source of the OS to give its software special privilege to reach inside of third-party apps.
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TeMPOraL ◴[] No.44502371[source]
Unfortunately the situation on Android is that other apps cannot do anything with WhatsApp, and there's fuck all you can do about it as a user.

I shouldn't need Google special-casing Gemini to allow LLMs to interact with my messages. I should be able to wire up Tasker to WhatsApp on one end, and to OpenAI or Anthropic models of my choice via API calls on the other end. Alas, Android is basically like iPhone now, just with more faux choice of vendors and less quality control.

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1. jeroenhd ◴[] No.44507708[source]
WhatsApp has been forced by the EU to provide access to third parties. If there's any app that third party apps can interact with, it's WhatsApp.

I also can't really find the mechanism at use here. I don't know if WhatsApp is exposing some kind of dedicated assistant API that an alternative assistant (the one you can pick in the settings) might be able to use.

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2. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.44508379[source]
I'll need to check again. Maybe it's my rusty Android skills, but last time I checked (circa a year ago), I got the impression it's going out of its way to stay fully opaque from the outside.

It's also notoriously the one popular app that intentionally doesn't offer any kind of API access for normal users - it only has one to allow companies to automate advertising bots.