My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn't have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I'd write, "Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room." Of course then we'd have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we'd receive a reply saying, "Fine, turn on the light in the dining room." The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.

We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.

5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that "AI" is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year's more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they've ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.

So Google half baked a product, pushed it to the public whether they wanted it or not, and now it's giving up on it replacing it with another half baked product nobody asked for...

Seems par for the course for Google

I do wonder, is it possible to flash custom firmware onto the nest cameras? I don't have any, but it would be a pity for alright hardware to go to waste.

Not multistage, but it's a heat pump with auxiliary heat. I have multiple zones controlled by dampers, too, soni have two of these thermostats.

I work for an un-named company that makes stuff that has google assistant on them. Initially we put hardware mutes and piped the microphones to physical hardware that monitored for wake up words locally and would then start piping the microphone data to the mother ship once it was heard. Google told us to stop that, only way to certify the product as compatible with Google Assistant was to pipe the raw microphone data to the mother ship 24/7. That was 5 years ago and I removed all devices from my house.

I s2g i will set my house on fire before i allow a unmodded google device in it

We have smart switches set to turn off floor sitting electricals if the leak sensor picks up a flood in the basement brewery. It also alerts us through HA there's a beernami

Hell, win Vista used to support it. I built a very very stupid jarvis years ago on a bored weekend with win VR and some zigbees

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.

If they kill Home. I’m done with Google products. I’m heavily integrated into nest and Google home. If they kill it further. I’m out.

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.

Totally read that in Abe Simpsons voice

Ahh, makes sense. Multizone is something I'll probably end up doing in my house soon, thankfully all my ductwork is exposed in the basement which makes it easy. Thanks appreciate it, I'm going to try to get a prototype board spun in the next week or two, test it out for a bit, and then see if other people are interested in them too. Appreciate the info, I should consider being able to control dampers also.

Amazon Alexa has followed the same trajectory.

I used to support the Home team. I saw them grow from nothing when I worked there. It’s pathetic what they are doing to everything.

I have a Google smart speaker that I got as a freebie. I used to use it (>3 years ago) for timers, alarms, etc. and had few problems, I just stopped when I moved and didn't set it up.
I put them back up a few months ago and it sure seems worse to me. Always triggering on random conversations, or to dialog on TV. Anyway they are permanent residents of the closet now. They suck.

Same, never had that issue with the old logos