Comment by vel0city
11 hours ago
As someone who's been using Workspace as a personal email account for over a decade this has been such a struggle forever. Just lots of odd limitations to feature sets all over the place.
When they swapped Google Assistant for Gemini as the default voice provider in Android Auto it was so annoying. My wife's non-work space account can get Gemini to do the normal things like play music and what not, but my Workspace one can't do much of anything at all. I can talk about nearly any random topic with it, but getting it to change the playlist, nah, can't help you there.
It's no surprise to me to see them fumble actually supporting a lot of the consumer features of Gemini into Workspace.
I'm in the same situation. But I was shocked discovering it goes both ways: many new Gemini functionalities are only accessible using a consumer account instead of a Workspace account. Also, Gemini is now the only major AI assistant with no support for MCP connectors. Instead of adding this to the core product, like ChatGPT and Claude did, somebody at Google decided that it was smarter to add this fundamental feature to a new product instead: for enterprises this is Gemini Enterprise (which is a product completely different from the Gemini app); for consumers this the new Gemini Spark agent (meaning that you can use MCP within Spark but not within a "non-agentic" chat)... It's clear to me this a symptom of Google shipping their org chart, which is a disaster from a product perspective.
I currently have a free trial AI Pro subscription that will run out next month.
If it weren't for the $10 GCP credit, I'd straight away cancel it. I don't see enough value in Gemini to justify the $20 subscription.
Similar here. I saw an email wanting the 20 bucks to continue and I outright laughed. There’s no planet on which that plan offers equivalent value to the OpenAI or Anthropic equivalents.
They might have success if they tried maybe a 12-15 dollar tier.
Microsoft’s Copilot products are a very similar situation where the enterprise and consumer (and GitHub) features only make sense if you think about the org chart. Both companies need stronger top down product thinking.
Maybe because they want to train on your data? Workspace AIs are not trained on your corporate data.
i think Google would see more success if they kept the CEO and everyone at the bottom (ie. doesn't manage anyone), and fired everyone else.
Build a whole new management tree - the current people all do a terrible job.
This drove me bonkers. You can enable play music (etc) in Android Auto for workspace accounts by enabling apps in Gemini. From memory (looking at the settings now, not 100% sure of the magic steps required), but go to admin.google.com, go to 'generative ai', 'gemini app', and 'apps settings', then turn on 'other Google apps'. This lets you play music (and other things) in Android Auto.
Ah, that could be it. I saw that "Other Google apps" and didn't think that would mean Spotify, but I guess its Android Auto or Google Assistant stuff. I'll give that a try, thanks for the tip.
The entire Google Workspace division is basically Microsoft. I assume they are making a lot of money in order to support their continued disfunction.
Also have a workspace as a personal email and ended up getting a personal gmail just to try out the subscriptions before I gave up.
I have multiple anthropic and OpenAI max plans. For Gemini I just use my Cursor $200 a month plan (which also gives me the ability to try grok, conductor, etc)
Workspace users have different terms of service. This is why new features always launch to consumer first.