Why even bother having it at all anymore. Can’t use it through Bluetooth, it’s slow, can’t hardly handle any tasks…
Google has completely lost the plot with their services.
Why even bother having it at all anymore. Can’t use it through Bluetooth, it’s slow, can’t hardly handle any tasks…
Google has completely lost the plot with their services.
They’re slowly phasing out Google assistant in an attempt to kill it.
My bet is that they’re trimming down its complexity so they can more easily/fully integrate it with Bard: https://blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-bard-generative-ai/
Google usually replaces something well built out with someone very incomplete.
Maybe their game here is to trim it to hell so Bard doesn’t look so comparatively incomplete?
They’re not that kind of self-aware internally, from what I’ve managed to gather from interviews and blogs by ex-Googlers.
They think they’re rewriting stuff to upgrade in one way or another based on internal pain points. The fact is, external criticism, even from real users, just doesn’t penetrate the Google social bubble unless it’s coming from another giant corporation or major government.
Gutting it is more like, but yeah I gather they’re doing something like this.
They’ve rendered my Google smart speaker mostly useless except as a glorified hands free on/off switch for lights and tv. I used to be able to add items to my shopping list on Bring via voice command, and then suddenly one day it stopped working because they got rid of the tool that enabled that function (I’m not using their shitty lists app instead). I also found out that a tracking app that I use for noting down baby feeding times and diapers used to have voice command functionality until, you guessed it, Google axed that feature. It worked perfectly well before, I’m guessing they didn’t want to pay people to maintain it.
I mostly used it for bring. Back in summer 2023 they nixed the API so I gather a lot of API integrations have stopped working.
Overall the quality of the product has gone down too. It doesn’t recognise me as well as it used to, and it very rarely attempts to give answers, usually you just get a “sorry I don’t understand” instead.
What’s really amusing to me is that HomeKit and Siri has become more reliable than Nest and Google Assistant is. Siri used to be laughable, and while it still doesn’t do as much as GA used to do, it is much smoother and rarely gives me BS answers. The only time I get annoyed with Siri is when it insists I unlock my phone for it to answer.
Google assistant barely even does lights for me anymore. It usually puts on some rubbish podcast instead. Or it cancels all alarms. Absolute garbage.