Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse
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As I understand it, Google mostly ships new stuff that they let die because it's one of the only ways to get a promotion at Google - to ship a product.
Once shipped, the newly promoted staff moves on to something else, and the business people take a look and see if the product actually makes any sense from a financial perspective, which is rarely the case.
I work at a place that needs completed projects to go up in levels/seniority but the problem is nothing gets completed. Ive been there for 2 years working on a very similar project I've completed with 5 other companies and it's yet to be finished. This type of project has always taken 3 months but here we are....
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In all fairness, in the early days of Google Assistant it really was useful. It actually worked. Somehow in the last 5 years it plummeted. As in it stunningly and noticeably kept getting worse year after year.
I still miss Google Now
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George Orwell was wrong. We didn't need the government to bug our houses, we did it ourselves.
️Whatchu mean we?
I got dumb troglodyte everything.
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If you really do swear them off, you will have dodged the next many bullets. They have made a solid pattern of killing off things we want. Generally, things we want don't make them enough money.
How tf are they still convincing users to join, or try new products is the real question.
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My understanding is the software is the problem, I don't understand why though.
Because software is hard to write and not many people want to spend their free time writing it???
Instead of complaining, Go be the change you want. It's all open source...
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what happened
Enshittification, LLM's
Nah that's a recent thing. Google assistant has been going downhill for ages long before this recent obsession with LLMs
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I don't use Google Wiretap, but I use google assistant on my watch to control the smarthome, and I would be very, very disappointed if it was dead
Wearing Google wiretap instead of putting it in your home isn't much better. Honestly it's probably worse.
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Nah that's a recent thing. Google assistant has been going downhill for ages long before this recent obsession with LLMs
Same with search! In the mid 2010's they removed a lot of the advanced search operators. Enshittification.
It turns out having too much control over what you find makes you spend less time looking (at ads).
Then they jammed in llm shit, for reasobs both simple and cynical and reasons convoluted stupid abd cynical.
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Wearing Google wiretap instead of putting it in your home isn't much better. Honestly it's probably worse.
It is because it doesn't listen to me constantly. You need to open the app and press the button.
I mean, you can let it listen, I just don't. -
In all fairness, in the early days of Google Assistant it really was useful. It actually worked. Somehow in the last 5 years it plummeted. As in it stunningly and noticeably kept getting worse year after year.
Mine used to be fantastic for recipes. It was nice having a small screen in the kitchen dedicated to recipes and background music. You could ask it for a recipe, it would automatically search for one, trim the mandatory “story of my family eating this meal so I can copyright it as a creative work” intro, and compile the recipe in easy-to-follow steps. But now I ask it for a recipe, and it just goes “I didn’t understand, but here are the search results.” Which just opens a web browser, meaning all the biggest reasons to use it (not digging through search results, skipping the intro, compiling everything into a step-by-step list that you can follow along with, etc) are all gone.
I only had it because it was a gift, but it was honestly extremely handy when my hands are busy and I didn’t want to be digging around on my phone constantly. But not anymore, because at least I have an adblocker on my phone.
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Get an ESP32, a temperature sensor, and 4x relay board and build your own with esphome!
If you pull the instructions for your thermostat, the wiring guide should tell you what each wire is for (because you can't trust wire colors). From there it's just wiring up the relays properly, getting the config built in esphome, and setting up a generic thermostat.
It sounds kinda daunting, but it's really not super complex. The only gotchas too look out for are any of the relays that can't be on when another relay is on. There's a way to prevent that in esphome. I'm sure someone has made a guide on it by now. I would have made one if I had gotten my enclosure figured out before my 3D printer took a hiatus.
The Nest Mini is not a thermostat.
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Give me a good non-cloud voice control system that works and I'll switch in a second. And on another note: The "Hey Google" command is so fucking annoying.
Idk if this covers your needs, but Home Assistant is non-cloud and supports voice commands. They're selling a voice hardware now (preview edition):
Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition
Bring choice to voice - the best way to get started with voice
Home Assistant (www.home-assistant.io)
While I've used HA for years, I've never tried any of the voice command methods, so can't really comment on it. I had just recently came across their voice hardware and am probably going to give it a try.
