Remember when Google made their assistant worse and we all predicted they were planning on bringing the same features back but using AI bullshit?

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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- Location-aware reminders is almost literally all I want from an assistant these days. "Remind me of x next time I'm at y, or by z time at the latest." Is this an impossible task? I can imagine how I would code it, but maybe I'm missing something.
set timers

This broke for me a few months ago. It just randomly... won't start, despite saying otherwise.
- “Set a timer that goes off at 9:15 am”
  
  *It proceeds to lecture me on the difference between an alarm and a timer, also, sets neither. *
- My wife cannot set timers on our Nest Hub. It just doesn’t understand her command. I’ll say the exact same sentence right after and it’ll work. We did reset her voice profile, remove/add her back, checked all settings possible, nothing worked. Such a decent piece of hardware (speakers are actually pretty good, and the screen is decent and bright) that’s ruined by shitty software. It’s been unplugged for the last month and I didn’t even care. It’s going on Marketplace next week lol
- I think this happened to me once when the assistant was trying to use another clock app than the native one.
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- Sometimes it can’t connect to the server (which is a completely stupid necessity).
  
  That's where it does the voice processing. The only processing it does on-device is the wake word and taking commands. Actually figuring out what you mean is done in The Cloud. Doing that on-device would not only make the devices significantly more expensive, but they would also rapidly become outdated.
  
  The rest of your complaints are valid and I've experienced them all myself to boot.

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"

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.
Yes this bothered be as well.

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.

To be fair, to some degree this is exactly the use case stochastic parrots (the thing we call 'AI' as a buzzword) can truly excel at:

Interpeting the bullshit we stammer out when we try to give a verbal command while totally not adhering to any reliable command structure.
Formulating a reply that sounds like fairly natural language despite how inane the sources used might be.

So yeah, we're finally at a real use case. Gimme! And from briefly trying it, Gemini is better at figuring things out from impresice input than Assistant was.

Make no mistake, it's ultimately the same backend. They just swapped the processing layer between audio-to-text parsing and running inputs from them (and again on the way back). Sadly no Google Now smartness at all, we've lost that forever. But hey, at least this improves stuff.

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…

yeah Apple doesn't take away your features, it just slows down your old device altogether so you're forced to buy a new one
- Honestly I'd disagree. Past the iPhone 4S, my iPhone 8 was fine through it's life before being replaced with a 13 mini a year or two ago when it suffered a naked gravitational incident at my hands. My parent's generally had hand-me-downs or used models and dad's 6s is still kicking and performing alright and even got a security patch a month ago.
  
  They had that battery snafu which I will absolutely fault their lack of transparency for (good ol' hide-the-workings-from-customers Apple) but I did encounter the issue it sought to trade performance for preventing in the past. (a worn battery causing random reboots on my 6s)
  
  Now my BlackBerry Priv? I miss that phone but I did not miss it's combination of slowing down with age plus updates running out at 6.0.1. Worst of both worlds but I miss sliders and Blackberry's additions. (not the size though)
  
  Similar in age (2015 models) but I doubt dad would be as tolerant of how it performed even a few years ago.
- that's generally how computers work though? Updated OS is more resource intensive and require upgrades after some time. My current iphone launched like 6 years ago and is running fine - yes there have been generation bumps that were rough for iPhone but is it supposed to last 10-15 years?

Google have really enshittified their services, to the point where I've seriously thought about using Bing as my search engine instead.

I use duck duck go. IIRC, it's based on bing. It's better.

I also use perplexity though. It's very useful.
- I struggle to find very obvious things when using ddg, unfortunately
  Feels bad
- Check out Ecosia. It's the same thing, but your searches plant trees in a responsible manner.
- In my use case, my privacy is already compromised from using mainstream tech, also cached pages are kinda a big deal.
Kagi. Not free, but the best.
- Kagi is tempting, and for how much I use search I may want to genuinely use it.
I already switched

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

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.

So Bob... We meet again

Hi Bob!

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

Only realized how Terrible Google assistant was when I started to use it with Android Auto.

I'd do unspeakable things to get Google Now and Now on Tap back.

And only for the US too.

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.

Gemini is terrible. It gets so many things wrong, and is wrapped in all sorts of DEI bullshit.

lEaDERShIp