Yeah. They did exactly that
The enshitification of Assistant is what prompted me, a few months ago, to embark on a quest to remove Google (and other cloud-based services) from my home automation setup. I’ve since swapped over to Home Assistant using Zigbee for almost everything.
I had to keep the Alexa integration going, or the other half would lose their god damned mind because apparently, that’s the only way on the entire planet to turn the light by the couch on and off.
But yeah, next up is just replacing all the light switches with zigbee-enabled ones so I can go full scary motion detection in a room thing. It’s going to be super futuristic in here, like 1998!
Home Assistant actually has its own voice control now. You can even set it up to trigger on the wake word “Alexa”
except the AI has even less features
Also, how does it work? Is it even as good?
It’s not, basic functionality has been lost, and instead of completing your requests, it initiates a search/conversation.
A few commands did work and it routed it through Assistant, but after failing my daily tasks I promptly uninstalled.
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It was always AI, what are you talking about?
Yeah but it wasn’t AI (the buzzword)
I think that’s the funniest part. Like, as far as I know, the regular Assistant uses the same approach to handling data that buzzword AI things use, a neural network. But branding (and potentially internal company politics) is weird, so they decided to kneecap Assistant in order to make Gemini look better on release.
Generative AI is different, it can generate better responses that aren’t just programmed canned responses. However I fully agree with you, they’re trying their hardest to do a bullshit rebrand with it. They could have just swapped it out with assistant and I would have been ecstatic. By rebranding it I get that same bad taste in my mouth whenever marketing elbows themselves into the conversation.
So… Literally the same voice input, but now with more time overhead waiting for responses so that it can be a bit more human sounding?
I disabled the Google App back when “Google Now” was still a thing. Remember when it would give you directions to get where you were going after you were already on your way? I’d be on the train, it’d tell me “oh, you wanna go somewhere? Get off the train, take a cab to the nearest train station, get on the train…”
They removed everything but sports score tracking, I kept using it for a while, and then I realized that I could just fucking use my browser for search, since that’s where I wanted to read search results anyway. And that’s what I did.
They’re going to keep doing this again and again, making their app worse and worse.
No idea why I would ever want the Google app back.
Google removed “Ok Google with the screen off” (made the toggle disappear, replaced with the option to allow its use in apps) on my Moto Z Play via Play Services updates and later advertised it as a Pixel-exclusive feature. (this was when the Pixel 1 was new)
Their support threads were ended curtly with statements of the phone not supporting the feature which I guess was technically true now that they changed it. (but no, the hardware always supported hotwords)
Never got that feature back and I bailed. For the ups and downs, I’m glad Apple doesn’t do that, instead omitting or handicapping new features for older devices. Of course not the best but yeesh, at least I don’t have to worry about “Hey Siri” being pulled to promote the iPhone 20 yet…
Enabling it completely breaks Reminders, btw. Or at least it has so far for me. It won’t let me set a reminder and previously set reminders don’t send a push notification. Other assistant things like timers and playing songs seems to hand off to Assistant correctly.
Edit: they seemed to have fixed this. Reminders function normally now.
thanks, that’s 90% what I use assistant for
Probably not the direction they’re going, but having this run offline like most of Pixels “AI” features would be great. I think the hardest part is the dataset training though, just having an offline assistant that works would be a win even if it wasn’t a LLM.
I’m trying to put distance between me and these data collection points and it’s hard.
It’s also so slow to answer basic questions.
History always comes back at some point
I’d do unspeakable things to get Google Now and Now on Tap back.
And only for the US too.
Gemini is terrible. It gets so many things wrong, and is wrapped in all sorts of DEI bullshit.
Android Auto used to be good. You can voice command navigate, send text, read notification, make a call and before it will read a basic Google search. Now even the navigation is <80% correct. The BMW voice assistant was so clunky compared to android auto but now they are racing to the bottom. At least BMW voice was consistent.
worse? What did I miss - it was never good to start with. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant - all they were ever used for was set timers and play songs.
AI is the only hope to make them marginally more useful than they are.
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