I spent a week with Magic Cue on the Pixel 10 — and it lied to me constantly

The Google Pixel 10 series has been available for a few weeks now, and one of the biggest feature announcements from the device – Magic Cue – piqued my curiosity in a major way.

It’s designed to provide subtle suggestions across a variety of Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Messages, and even some third-party apps like WhatsApp, to make the Pixel interface even more seamless with these widely used platforms.

However, in my brief experience with the Pixel 10 Pro so far, Magic Cue barely popped up in a meaningful way while organically using the device.

Even worse, when I started encouraging my wife to text me messages that would elicit Magic Cue suggestions, the service either made mistakes, generated hallucinations, or didn’t provide valuable suggestions.

My first Magic Cue suggestions

Lots of ‘View calendar’ and not much else

To make this guide as genuine as possible, I did my best not to specifically prompt Magic Cue to provide suggestions in my first week with the Pixel 10 Pro.

I wanted to see how organically the new feature would provide assistance in my everyday life, without making inquiries that are designed to bring Magic Cue to the forefront.

Unfortunately, that didn’t go very well. In earnest, I didn’t even notice many notable suggestions, certainly not any that were a massive improvement from the previous Android experience on my former Pixel 8 Pro.

The only meaningful change I noticed was when someone would message about a date, or a day, or a time, Magic Cue would recommend me to “View calendar,” which just opened the calendar app.

Beyond that, I didn’t get much. There were some instances where it would recommend a few phrases, but nothing groundbreaking. Most consistently, I was something along the lines of “Okay,” “Haha,” or “No plans yet.”

In my opinion, you probably don’t need a high-powered chip with AI capabilities to pull that off.

Testing Magic Cue in Messages

Errors and hallucinations galore

Because I couldn’t organically get Magic Cue to pop on my Pixel 10 Pro, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I gave my wife a list of questions to send me in Messages that would, in theory, prompt the new feature to provide helpful responses based on information that was readily available in Gmail, Google Calendar, Screenshots, and beyond.

That didn’t go well, either. I started off pretty easy, with a prompt specifically shown in the Google announcement for the feature. I asked for the address of an event I had scheduled in Google Calendar for the weekend.

Despite asking about the event directly by the name of the calendar entry and the calendar entry clearly featuring an address, Magic Cue provided the name of a neighborhood instead of the address. Even worse, the event was not in that neighborhood.

I tried the same interaction in a third-party app, WhatsApp, with Google noting in the announcement that these kinds of suggestions would work via the Gboard, so they should be effective outside first-party Google apps.

I had my wife ask what the address of my comedy show was this weekend. This time, it did provide an address! Unfortunately, it was a completely fabricated address of a comedy club that does not exist. Yes, AI hallucinations are still very real in 2025.

Next up, I had my wife request a flight number for a trip I’m going on next month. Luckily, instead of providing incorrect information, Magic Cue provided no suggestions at all, despite this being clearly referenced as a use case in the Google announcement.

I thought that perhaps I hadn’t provided enough information, so I had my wife ask again, with more details to guide Magic Cue along.

Instead of providing the flight number, Magic Cue suggested I “Share Photos,” which I hoped would at least take me to the screenshot of my flight information. Instead, it just opened the Google Photos gallery of my camera roll, not my screenshots.

Perhaps the only bright spot in my Magic Cue testing was when I had my wife text me that she wanted to do something at a specific place on a specific day at a specific time.

Magic Cue provided an icon to create an event in Google Calendar that remained in the Messages app consistently, even when other messages came through.

Unfortunately, when I clicked it, the calendar entry was completely blank, missing the specific location, the specific day, and the specific time.

The future of Magic Cue is bright

… If it gets better

While my initial experience with Magic Cue was lackluster — and make no mistake, lackluster is being generous — it’s pretty obvious that this kind of technology has a bright future.

Google has an undeniable ability to integrate these kinds of advanced features into an easy-to-use interface, and the simple, basic Magic Cue prompts have the potential to make even the most specific task as easy as a single click.

That is, if the service gets better, and fast. Google ran into a similar problem with its AI Overview service on Search, providing incorrect information, hallucinating dangerous responses, and generally making the platform worse, rather than better.

If Google can give Magic Cue the same high-speed optimization that allows it to do what they claim it can do (looking at you, flight numbers), then this could be a very valuable feature in the Android ecosystem.