To me this highlights the core failure with all these voice-driven UIs: you have absolutely no idea what is possible and what isn't. Discoverability is zero, which makes big changes like this even more disruptive.
I've already decided that I'm done with Google's smart assistant stuff in any case. I have a Google Home with a screen in my kitchen and the most-used feature (aside from just existing as a photo frame) was an integration with a really useful shopping list app called AnyList. It certainly wasn't complex, we'd say "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list" and it would do it. But it was very useful: I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing. If it had to wait until I was done for me to pull out my phone I'd inevitably forget.
Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides (which naturally has way fewer features than AnyList). They've never provided even the remotest defense for why they've removed it, it's very obviously to lock us into the Google ecosystem. So our Google Home is now a glorified photo frame that plays music from time to time (and even then prioritizes cover versions and YouTube videos over actual songs, presumably because $$$)
On top of what you mentioned in your first sentence, any ideas to improve discoverability are horrible. I hate it when Alexa does not play my podcast right away but explains to me how I can change episodes. I despise Alexa for telling me that I have some notification before starting my timer. And so on - any voice only attempt to explain me something without me asking for it means adding a lot of friction between me and my goal.
The constant "By the way..." from Alexa drove me nuts.
If you say "Alexa, stop by the way", it'll get the device to stop responding with follow-ups for ~24h. I ended up creating a routine that runs every night at 4am to lower the volume to zero, automatically say "stop by the way" to the device, and then raise the volume a minute later, and Alexa has stopped with the follow ups
I just discovered this today, but if you whisper to your Echo, it will skip all of the "by the way" BS (it will also reply in a whisper, which is kind of creepy, but you win some, you lose some).
Yes... when it does anything other than what I ask, it makes me feel like it's wasting my time.
Alexa recently started responding with "Good afternoon! <the normal response>" and it irks me more than it probably should. I've looked to see if I can turn it off and can't find the option.
As a Brit, when I bark "Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes" and Alexa prefixes her reply with "Good evening <pause>", TO ME that sounds like a bitter correction-by-example to my abruptness. It's the sarcastic opposite of a pleasantry.
Can you instruct it to "stop the greetings - go straight to the response"? Doesn't Alexa (yet) have some LLM behind it that will create a profile just for you?
Spot on! Lot of voice assistants have been following "if we could" line instead of "if we should line". For many straightforward applications, clicking through well defined interface can be the least error prone way to get the job done.
Seriously though. The development of every company to just trash faq's or an "assistant" or third party forums is awful. Trying to get help with technology is almost always infuriating now.
I recently had to contact windows help, and they were useless. The windows forum points to a third party software that I am convinced is malware.
And while I'm ranting, why can't the download folders in windows be set to group by "none" and sort by "name" by default? Why are both "most recently edited" by default? AND WHY CAN'T I CHANGE IT MICROSOFT?
Maybe WinSetView [0] and the options [1] it provides might be of use to you? It was able to resolve the issues I was facing so hopefully it can work for you as well.
I'm not dying for them to record more than absolutely necessary, but I really hope all the voice ui engineers do log curses to know when their app is doing annoying stuff. The number of times these things screw up I definitely get really spicy and hope that feedback makes it back.
Luckily the Google Assistant is basically worthless.
Setting a timer and have it remind you that you could have set an alarm instead is annoying, but there have been multiple examples where we set a timer and the Google home mini seems to forget it.
> okay Google, set a timer for 1 hour
>> Certainly, and did you know that I can also look up Wikipedia entries for you.
>> Timer for 1 hour has been set and is starting now
> okay Google, how much longer left on timer
>> You don't appear to have any timers set at this time.
I'm pretty sure that our robot overlords will either forget, get distracted with generating mis-information, or become artists painting portraits of furries.
I remember (maybe its still like this!) there used to be a page you could go to and see all your alexa voice clips since forever. It's amazing amazon has gone so long not caring about privacy without backlash.
I'm an Android user and have never owned an iPhone, but that sounds to me like you're talking about a push notification setting that is completely separate from an Alexa response setting. I could be wrong, but my guess is that that's why you're getting downvoted.
Thanks for posting that possible misinterpretation :)
Everything in my post was Alexa-specific. Someone who has the stated problem can follow that precise and non-obvious menu tree within the Alexa app, and it will solve their problem. It's a device-specific setting, so can be done on the kitchen Alexa without affecting other units.
Both "notification" [1] and "Do Not Disturb" [2] in my post were Alexa-specific terms that are unrelated to their mobile phone brethren.
The kids used to love our Google mini speaker. There were voice activated games, normal stories, choose your own adventure style stories and a fun little “animal of the day” feature.
Every single one of those things have been deprecated and removed for… reasons?
All we can do with the speaker now is ask it to play music, get the weather, or set a timer.
It's not just voice, but conversational interfaces in general that have this discoverability problem. That means chatGPT. I'm glad people are discovering it, if you excuse the pun. CUIs are not a panacea, not a replacement for conventional UIs.
I think there's a line worth drawing here: Pre-LLM voice interfaces required you to guess the command(s) the designer of the thinking were having in mind for the action you want to perform. With LLMs you can be 10ft into human-level vaguery and metaphorism and your intent might still survive.
So the difference wrt discovery is that you only have to gesture at what you wanna do and, if a matching action exists, there is a chance it will be understood.
I'd wager we'll see a renaissance of voice assistants with LLMs, especially once the good-enough ones can run on device.
When you put it that way I am reminded of my youthful efforts at solving puzzles in Sierra Online text adventures by guessing the right prompt. I guess I got early training for successfully interacting with LLMs :)
There are obviously cases where CUIs work well: while driving if you don’t have a physical button to do the thing you want, the CUI is better than a screen UI, and if it’s a complex thing, you would never have a physical button for it anyways. In the home when you want to control devices in the morning “open all the shades” or “open the north shades”, unlock the door and start the car, etc…
Not really conversations though, more like accessible commands. I don’t think we get conversations until the tech improves and the latency goes way down, meaning on device processing of speech at the very least.
I’ve had exceptionally bad experiences with car CUIs - all the problems of trying to figure out exactly how to tell Alexa what to do (and then figure out what Alexa actually _did_) while going 70mph in traffic. Just give me physical buttons.
it reminds me of all the old text games like Zorg or whatever where they gave you a cursor leaving you to figure out what you could ask/say/do. which is fine for a game. it sux for a "tool"
Funny fact is that this is core use case I use siri to add things to the reminders app which I have a smart list called "shopping list." It's amazing how great this is, and how many times I use this.
This and music control are the uniques cases where Siri Just Works for me. “Add toothpaste to my shopping list” no fluff no nonsense replies, just “I added that to the shopping list” - and it’s on my phone’s Reminders in that list.
I wonder how well they’ve optimised Siri for a just few specific use cases like this, because nothing else seems to reliably work on it.
Today for the first time I asked Siri for the weather forecast for next week and it actually replied in a sensible way.
Until now I have only been saying simple commands like "countdown n minutes" or "call my favorite wife" (I only have one but thankfully she is also my favorite.)
I think this kind of highlights the ios vs android user mentality. afavour is annoyed that google is trying to lock them into only using google's shopping list while you love when apple "just works" within their ecosystem.
As an iOS user and dev, I’ve been reading these comments confusedly.
Apple has exposed Siri to us as developers in several ways, one of which is called “Siri intents.”
The long and short of it is that app developers can hook into the Siri system so users can use Siri commands to control certain parts of third-party apps.
This means that users aren’t locked into using, say, Apple’s own Reminders app, and they can tell Siri to add things to third-party to-do list apps.
Users also have the option to create their own workflow via Shortcuts and give it a command phrase that Siri then responds to.
I assumed something similar was available on Android, but the responses indicate that this might not be the case.
I second this. My two other derived commands I use every day are “remind in 2 hours to do X” or “remind me Friday at 7 to take Y”. This and “timer X minutes”.
I would be very sad if these were to disappear or to stop working as well as it does now (I like that if I say “remind me tomorrow” when it’s right past midnight it asks for confirmation that I actually mean the same day since it’s “already tomorrow”)
My Google Home - Lenovo Smart Clock just says "I'll remind you today at $TIME".
The device is out of support, it has its glitches (e.g. it's still able to play and pause podcasts, but after pausing it would say "Sorry. something's gone wrong", if asking it to snooze an alarm it would say "OK, alright" and then "snoozing for 10 minutes"), looking forward (not!) to Google making a breaking change and it being e-waste soon.
Hah, in the imaginary future where we have cyborg assistants instead of climate destruction, my robot butler will pour half a cup of tea, go back to the kitchen, and then return to pour the second half of the cup, and I'll tell my guest, "Yeah, it's a 5 year old model, the startup that made him went bust so I'm using a firmware from a Ukranian forum... Джевс, можна мені трохи цукру?"
I still have a Google Home in the kitchen, but what I really want it to display is data from my weather station, transit info, the time, etc. I can't control that damn thing at all. I've got a TidByt coming today, which I have high hopes for!
I haven't used it myself, but Home Assistant can cast to a Google Home Hub, so afaiu, you can set up a whole dashboard of widgets and controls and use it from a stock Home Hub.
Nice! What I really want, though, is a local API! I can use a starlark script to grab entity states from my local Home Assistant super easy... but then I have to cUrl them up to a Tidbyt server somewhere, only to have it sent right back into my house. Seems kinda silly, and will break anytime my internet goes out.
Are you referring to casting a URL to open a browser on the home hub? I tried that in the past but it was kinda janky. It's definitely possible with something like https://demille.github.io/url-cast-receiver/ though
This problem can be solved pretty soon though; given a good enough LLM, and perhaps for power users a configurable set of integrations, you should be able to make any language request, translate it into verbs, and ask for an explanation if you get confusing results. With in-context learning perhaps you can even get to the holy grail of “when I ask for X, please always apply interpretation Y” for personalization.
I think the broader context here is that Google is downsizing the current Assistant team in preparation for an LLM-based replacement, perhaps once Gemini has rolled out.
Yeah, beware “no true Scotsman” here. But I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that GPT-4 is “good enough” or close to it, and when the current assistant services get wired up to LLMs we’ll see a step function in their utility. Apple and Google are both definitely working on this. OpenAI’s voice mode is closer capability-wise, but doesn’t have the integrations; that would be an obvious product for them to do this year.
If this doesn’t seem obvious in 1yr I’d say the hypothesis is likely wrong.
Sounds to me like a silver bullet idea. "LLMs will make it good".
I don't think voice is a good interface. "It chats like a human" is the lowest possible hanging fruit in terms of product design, and bets everything on the smarts of the tech that's behind it.
We are so used to tooling faster than voice. Keyboards and taps are very, very fast. I want digital assistants as smart AND as fast as that, not something smart but incredibly slow to interact with because it needs to dumb itself down to human speech I/O.
To me, this is also not about modality or making it more generic. I just don't want an anthropomorphized smart-ass assistant. I want smart tools that actually assist me directly, no chat.
Agreed. I find it utterly exhausting to talk to most humans, at least when my goal is purely transactional or functional. Human conversation takes work. Let's save it for what matters.
People hate call centers. I don't want to have a conversation with some human or human-parity AI at my airline, I want to change my flight in 3 clicks. In retail and fast food, self-checkout and online or kiosk ordering is popular for a reason.
I've found myself feeling those same feelings when being forced to have conversations with a chatbot. Chatting with ChatGPT just for fun can be fun, but it can be just as painful as a call center if you need to get something specific done. In order to cancel a hotel reservation, I was having to chat with some bot. It made it into a whole conversation, with brief pauses. It should have been 3 clicks.
I don’t think I’m naively expecting LLMs to magically fix things. The reason voice is currently a bad interface is that the agents are dumb, mapping verbs to hand-coded action trees. The missing pieces are first intelligence and second long-term adaptability/personalization.
The removal of the AnyList integration drove us to get an Alexa assistant device in the kitchen. It still works there
Never thought amazon would have the better assistant ecosystem. Google already has my email and calendar and other stuff, Amazon I have to auth into them like a third party. But it's become true
I've been meaning to get around to trying an Apple HomePod Mini, the AnyList integration on my iPhone works okay (thought as an infuriating two-step process, "Hey Siri, add to shopping list" ... "milk") so hopefully it would be replicable on the pod, too. Seems like the least worst option.
I've been playing with homeassistant voice integration and it's pretty darn good
There are some gpt and llama experiments you can run there, but it's finally getting to the point where a local assistant you host yourself might be viable soon
Getting audio into it and having a little speaker so it can talk back is both the easiest and the hardest part. I need to play around more with some esp32s and microphone modules
Quite the opposite. I bike the kids to school every morning. The weather is too important to be summed up by a voice summary, I need the hour by hour details.
> I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing.
Non user-hostile technology would happily solve this problem: you pull from the fridge what is about to finish or before throwing the empty container into the trash, put it in front of a mini camera mounted on the fridge, image (possibly also barcode) recognition would identify the product, then you say a magic word and it would be added it to your list directly on the phone, then software would calculate the best path to the shops having in stock the products in the list.
Sadly, this would be hijacked by businesses in no time by making it dependent from some cloud services then selling your data to other advertisers or by pestering you with offers of similar competing products.
As of today, I still prefer a pen and a piece of paper over any type of automation.
Who in their right mind would bring this kind of intrusive technology into their home, right into their most intimate space? I seriously don't get it. I mean what's wrong with keeping a pen & paper shopping list on your fridge?
I’m not denying that personal conversations happen in the kitchen. But the most intimate space? That’s pure hyperbole.
Not to mention I think the paranoia about these home assistant devices is overblown. Do you use a smartphone? In your intimate kitchen?? It has just as much capability to listen to you.
You’re making an argument of false equivalency. Anyone who has used Siri can tell you that its listening capabilities are vastly overstated. There is a reason they make smart speakers and don’t just leverage your phone, despite the fact that almost everyone with a smart speaker has both.
We have a saying that loosely translates to “If the barn burns down, so does the house”. The meaning is that it’s not really wise to let the house burn down if the barn is burning.
Anything inside my house is the intimate space. I block the “smart” devices on the router firewall level so that they cannot call home - and here in this thread dozens of people use those spying devices that listens to you and to your family members and send this information to who knows where - this is just mind boggling to me. To each their own for sure, but using “smart home” devices made by corporations is absolute insanity in my head.
Yikes. About the discoverability issue. I can add a little story.
I can not for the love of my life get Siri to resume play in my native tongue. It is supported by Siri, I just have no clue on earth on what phrases she accepts. Tried many, started feeling dumb. Turned off Siri.
I think it's hilarious that you can't reliably ask Assistant "what is this song?" any more but they've provided a dedicated button for what should be an easy query to process.
In other words, they have just closed down that entire ecosystem. I don't think there's an antitrust angle here: Forcing e.g. Apple to allow third-party apps or app stores seems within reach (at least in the EU); this would be more like forcing Apple to enable apps in a world where they don't even exist (anymore).
"If there is no banner, your Actions project is not a Conversational Action and won’t be affected."
Here, "conversational" means your voice command should prompt the app to ask you a question, driving a state machine. (Set a reminder. When do you want to be reminded?)
I haven't tried to use it, but the docs indicate CRUD-over-voice ("built-in intents") is unaffected.
I had the same issue with the Google Assistant/AnyList integration, and I hacked together a pair of Lambda functions to move Keep list items to an AnyList list.
Both unofficial APIs ;)
A big portion of the limited discovery of available commands is deliberate so as not to limit what you might ask it to do, which can be used as input for future capabilities.
> "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list"... was very useful... Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides
If I recall correctly, "add to my list" originally went to shoppinglist.google.com. They rolled it into Keep[1] ("note to self," tags, sharing).
It works well. However...
In 2016, I figured "tell me showtimes for $MOVIE in $CITY" should work. It still doesn't work. It may never work, because "robot butler with ads" is no one's idea of the future. (Maybe Jeff.)
A fire-and-forget voice action like "add to list" should still work(?). For conversations[2], we can pray Gemini is less infuriating.
Did you actually try your cinema prompt recently? I just asked my pixel phone "tell me showtimes for aquaman in Berlin" and it immediately opened an overview of cinemas with showtimes for the Aquaman movie today with options to buy the ticket.
Same for the weather prompt someone else posted above and contrary to their experience it showed me exactly what I expected.
I'm a bit confused if those examples are something that didn't work in the past or if it's something that somehow doesn't work properly in the US right now.
VIM is well designed and stable, so you can learn the interface and be confident that it will work for you next time you use it. It's an amazing tool.
Today's voice assistants are the opposite. They are unreliable and completely unstable. They don't have a clear list of commands they understand, let alone some sort of menu system - the documented commands on the manufacturer's websites often don't work. They also randomly change what they can do: stuff stops working for no obviously reason.
For example - yesterday, my son's Nest Audio suddenly refused to set a music alarm, claiming "this device doesn't support that feature yet" (it's literally a speaker for music...). It worked the day before.
Vim has an actual manual and things stay relatively stable across releases. It's not the case for the voice assistants, where stuff breaks randomly and features are added/removed without notification.
Another step in Android's steady progression of become less and less useful hands-free. It's incredible to me that my experience with my Nexus One in 2010 was better than it is today with a Pixel 7. The fact that it arbitrarily decides to not recognize some contacts on some days. The fact that it can't handle me spelling out a street name when it insists on replacing the street name that I'm saying with something completely different. The fact that YouTube Music would always play "some driving music" that it chooses over my playlist literally called "Driving Music", when I would say "Play my Driving Music Playlist on YouTube Music". And now the assistant is getting even less personalized, which means it will care even less about what you're literally saying, and just send you into a swamp of generic assumptions.
Assistants were SO much more usable when they would require strict trigger language, and interpret it literally and formulaically. Yes you would have to learn its language, but once you did, you could actually accomplish what you wanted to accomplish, unlike today.
Google needs to toss Sundar and get a competent CEO who can forcefully smash the org back into line.
Google has turned into these little micro clusters of ideologies and functional philosophies, leading to a horrifically fragmented mess of google branded products. All which come loaded now with end-of-life anxiety as google just farts out products that seem to dissipate just as fast.
The fact that most google apps function better on iOS than Pixel phones should be enough to get any sane board to take action. This is without even mentioning the disaster that search has become, or completely dropping the ball on LLMs.
I think upper management at big tech thinks having these internal warring factions somehow creates better products. What I hear from friends in FAANG is the VPs and directors don't even know what they're supposed to be working on most of the time.
Mine decided to helpfully alert me that there were three birthdays on January 1st, because it had somehow reset some contacts' birthdays to Jan 1, 1970.
Except when I went to check the Contacts to fix them, they had no birthday at all.
Yep. It is a pretty useless device if you cannot hold it in your hand and unlock it. So for example, when I ride my bike I can pause the music or receive a call and not much else.
I wonder how many road deaths their declining hands-free quality has contributed to? I'd wager the number has more than two digits. It's one thing to never have supported something hands-free, but when something that you used to be able to regularly do hands-free all of a sudden doesn't work, drivers are bound to get frustrated and use the device hand-held.
another thing your pixel 7 cannot do: copy Chinese text.
even on apps like google maps. open any place with Chinese chars in the name. toggle the app switcher carousel. try to select the name of the place. only non Chinese text will be copied.
I'm pretty convinced this is because the app switcher can recognize _whether_ a part of an app's UI is a native text field and not just an image, but it's not smart enough to pull the text out. I've seen it make number 0 -> letter O and other such mistakes before, so I'm convinced it's using OCR. Which is probably harder for Chinese.
It's crazy to me that it can't just use the accessibility APIs.
For all the hype "AI" gets these days, it's amazing how much things have regressed. My Android phone used to remember where I parked and show it on my Google Now feed and a push notification as I headed out, all without ever asking it to do anything. The travel.google.com site used to show my itineraries without ever adding them there. Hotels, flights, car rentals, and more would be aggregated. Doesn't do that anymore. You used to just be able to search for "my flights" on Google and it'd tell you about you about your upcoming flights.
The old Google Now feed was amazing. Showed me where my car is parked. Told me when to leave to arrive places in time. Pulled up my flight details automatically. Now it's just a bunch of click bait articles.
It was fantastic. It's worth noting that Pixel's At a Glance does still tell you when to leave (and you get a notification), but as far as I can tell, the parking features are completely gone.
That being said, I no longer have any clue what features exist in Google's ecosystem because their A/B and feature flag rollout system is so fundamentally broken and misused by the product teams that some features literally never arrive for some users until they factory reset their devices, and suddenly they get a fresh set of feature flags. I am still waiting on just about all of the new RCS features Google announced months ago, and just yesterday I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my partner's devices never received cross device timers while all of my devices do. That feature was launched in May of last year. My partner does a lot of the cooking, and our kitchen Nest Hub usually handles the timers. But only my phone and tablet receive it's timer status...
I say misused above, because it strongly appears that they announce features before completion and then use an extremely shallow rollout to finish the features with the cover of "finding bugs". Is it actually released if the only Google accounts that receive the flags are the dev and product team members?
Google, you've perverted a fantastic engineering practice into a broken mess that reduces your user's confidence in your product and breeds confusion that hurts your brand.
I have a very similar experience. When I bought an EV I wanted to turn on Google Maps' energy efficient routing feature (announced in 2021 at https://blog.google/products/maps/3-new-ways-navigate-more-s...) but the setting is simply not present. After an hour of wasted time debugging, I had to uninstall and reinstall the app to get the setting to show up.
I personally much prefer Apple's approach where generally features are identified by specific version numbers. If you have the version or newer, you have it. Certainly a bit more difficult to do capacity planning for the backend engineers but absolutely worthwhile for users.
I've been using (and paying!) https://simpl.fyi/ for a few years now and it makes up for missing inbox for me. It was founded by the design lead for Inbox. Highly recommend if you use a Chromium-based browser.
I wish they'd spend some of that energy on exploring the ethics of neglecting and abandoning products that people spend time and energy on, integrating them into their homes and workflows.
Also, some companies stopped including the essential data in the email itself, eg. eshops won't list the products or tracking numbers directly in the order confirmation email, but only link to their website where gmail can't extract it. I think I've seen some airlines do the same, though most do include a boarding pass attachment.
Just like how California is a big enough market that it drove emissions improvements in American cars, Europe is a big enough market that it drives privacy improvements in the world-wide internet.
Yes, Siri was initially amazing, but it never improved significantly. Several years ago Google's voice assistant was much better than Siri, but it has degraded enough now that it's roughly on a par with Siri. But however disappointing Google Assistant is now, it's better than it will be tomorrow.
>"Yes, Siri was initially amazing, but it never improved significantly."
I feel like the same can be said for Auto-Correct, also from about the same era. How is it that with all of the edge processing it's still the same old miserable experience? It seemed to me that it actually got worse.
Software has to be maintained. Nobody wants to do maintenance of their own works — it doesn’t look like a new accomplishment in a performance cycle. Nobody wants to inherit maintenance work. Google’s perf cycle directly causes its graveyard issues.
I feel its genuinely important to not dismiss this valid observation, and recognize it as actually something that is happening. Its not just Google, and I think Johnathan Blow captures the trend really well in this talk [1].
Both the doomers and e/accs can be wrong. "Today is the worst that AI will be" isn't a foregone conclusion. There aren't many domains of software that haven't degraded in quality, and even functionality, if at least a little bit; and there is no evidence that the same won't happen to AI. Technologists say AGI will happen; but why this happens is really outside the hands of the technologists, somewhat more in the hands of the capitalists, but really outside of anyone's hands and in the capitalist system itself; it can't be stopped.
Maybe they did A/B testing and found out that it reduces the revenue when it’s populated with everything you need? Maybe you end up using the phone less?
A lot of the changes just don't make any sense? Some of the features removed:
- Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages
- Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.
- Asking to take certain actions by voice, such as send a payment, make a reservation, or post to social media. You can still ask Assistant to open your installed apps.
- Asking to meditate with Calm. You can still ask for meditation options with media providers such as YouTube.
All of these seem to fall under the umbrella of "features that actually make the assistant an assistant"/connecting the assistant to other apps, which I imagine is exactly the opposite of where the Assistant trend is going, especially with LLMs. Just speaking to a device about which action you want to take and not needing to think which app you need to open and navigate feels like the UX of the future, whatever this is seems like the opposite.
My guess is that a lot of these features are hard-coded, and they are deprecating them in order to replace them with a more generic LLM-based assistant.
Perhaps, but it seems like a strange approach. I would assume they would retain these features and then gradually replace each one with an LLM-based approach.
They are probably statistically some of the lesser used features and since there were layoffs in Assistant ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947224 ) they are probably looking to shrink the codebase being maintained.
Assistant has trained our household into thinking that its pretty limited in what it can do so everyone in our home only uses it for basic things. Since Google's assistant can't accomplish more than most basic tasks people don't use more than the basic tasks. No one wants to learn the appropriate subset of English to speak the Google assistant dialect. You really need the voice assistants to be reliable and basic or extremely capable. There is no real middle ground here for most users.
Hopefully once LLMs get more integrated with voice assistants we will move more towards the extremely capable side of the spectrum.
Just because an LLM can better parse what you're saying it does not mean the business logic to act on it exists. The feature discoverability and churn problem will still exist.
This feature already exists for LLM's -- you can provide them with the list of actions that it can do. This is how you integrate with an API. You describe your "turn on the lights" endpoint and so when you say "I need a bit more light" and it knows it can do something about it.
The users of LLM-based products don't know that; its programmers do. And what happens when an integration is added or removed; how is the user supposed to know?
So, a programmer with LLM knowledge will have a startup idea to wrap all of this up in a nice little app. You say "turn on the lights", the app passes that to the LLM.
The LLM, having been pre trained on what to do, calls the API to turn on the lights.
Wow that's a big list of surprisingly useful features being ripped out.
I'd already noticed my new phone (pixel 8, I fucking hate it) had trouble setting a simple timer with a voice command ( last time I tried it gave me a shitty youtube video result of a 10 minute timer!?!), but this list of removed features goes further, removing other basic functionality from voice assistance.
If all a voice assistant can do is google my "command" and read me the results, that's a terrible experience. The whole selling point (to me) is the ability to do something magic with what I'm asking.
Taking a guess, based on experiences with using Google Assistant extensively:
What do you do if you have statistics saying that, say, a feature is used by a small fraction of users, and 40% of the activations of the feature were in fact not what the user wants, and instead were misunderstandings of requests for something else?
So ask for clarification. State your interpretation and give an opportunity for the speaker to confirm or clarify. This isn't some new intractible issue, this has always been a fundamental aspect of communication in a natural language.
What do you hate about the Pixel 8? I have one and find it pretty good, although I'm a very casual mobile phone user (USA-based, on Google Fi). I like that it's at least slightly smaller than the Pixel 7.
It's hard to describe what exactly I don't like. Initially I thought it was just a muscle memory thing but I've had it long enough now that I've got used to the different UI for everyday things and try to use it's shortcuts on my old phone.
But overall I don't like it.
I don't like how it handles notifications, it seems to hide most of them, and the ones it does show it doesn't show in a useful way compared to my old phone. What exactly is different I can't say, but it's weird.
It also handles permissions differently. Some apps when I disable certain permissons get stuck in a permission loop because they can't cope with the idea of only having a particular permission denied. I never had this problem with my old phone despite it also having granular permissions. Seems to be related to a change in how notification permissions are handled exactly.
I don't like how I can't quickly change the ringer volume. It used to be a separate slider when I hit the volume on my old phone. Changing now is a gamble and finding how to get it to vibrate mode seems beyond me.
1Password used to allow biometric unlock on my old phone. I can't get that to work on my new phone so have to type the master password (extremely long password) on a mobile device, which makes it useless to me. I'm not going to type my master password on a phone keypad in public, that's asking for it to leak.
The fingerprint sensor is okay, but I preferred the below-screen sensor on my old phone.
It's fiddly to get back to the home screen. On my old phone if I scanned my thumbprint it would go back to home. On the pixel it's a finicky swipe-up-from-the-bottom thing which sometimes goes home and sometimes goes to an app-switcher.
Setting up the phone required giving google rather more permissions than I was comfortable with, but denying them locked out key features of the phone so I felt forced to accept.
The pixel 8 is also slightly smaller than my old phone, though of course I knew that when I bought it. I didn't realise how much 0.1inches was going to feel like a major loss. I didn't want to go over-sized with the pixel 8 pro though.
Overall a downgrade and really horrible experience compared to my old phone, which I only replaced because it was so old and stopped getting regular updates. It was a Huawei P20 pro and in terms of general use still feels just as fast as it did when it was new.
The only feature I like that the pixel 8 has which my old phone doesn't is the wireless charging. That's a game changer when it comes to preventing wires wearing out.
>I don't like how it handles notifications, it seems to hide most of them, and the ones it does show it doesn't show in a useful way compared to my old phone.
If an app's notification is set to "silent", it'll push it below a certain divider line, and some notifications may be hidden while in DND mode, and then revealed when out of DND, which is a disjointed experience and not the best, but _is_ configurable.
>I don't like how I can't quickly change the ringer volume. It used to be a separate slider when I hit the volume on my old phone. Changing now is a gamble and
Yeah, this used to be easier. Now you have to click the ellipsis at the bottom of the volume slider to open up the other volumes, but it's clearly labeled.
>finding how to get it to vibrate mode seems beyond me.
This is simple: it's the phone icon at the top of the volume interface when you change volume.
>1Password used to allow biometric unlock on my old phone.
This seems to work for me on my P8Pro
>It's fiddly to get back to the home screen. On my old phone if I scanned my thumbprint it would go back to home. On the pixel it's a finicky swipe-up-from-the-bottom thing which sometimes goes home and sometimes goes to an app-switcher.
I absolutely hate the gesture navigation but I solved this by sticking with the old school 3-button navigation, which you can change in settings.
Ah, totally fair, I was thinking more about hardware than the OS stuff. On my side, I prefered the rear fingerprint sensor and plastic (lighter, less slippery) on some earlier pixels. Nexus 5 was my favorite, I think I'd be happy with new guts in that phone (although waterproofing is nice).
On the OS side of things, when switching between activities, very rarely my last activity is to the right in the carousel rather than to the left. Because I can't predict when it happens, I can't mindlessly switch to my previous activity, which is surprisingly annoying.
> last time I tried it gave me a shitty youtube video result of a 10 minute timer!?!
A YouTube video has the chance to earn them advertising revenue. A 10-minute timer does not.
However, they are clearly missing an opportunity: "Your 10-minute timer, sponsored by Burger King, has finished. Would you like to order a Whopper to be delivered by Uber Eats?"
I was watching a friend use Siri the other day (I've never used an iPhone) and I was blown away by how much it could accomplish in comparison to Google Assistant. He said he used Siri as the default way of interfacing with his phone, which I found interesting.
Reading this list of removals, especially the removal of CALLER ID, on video calls no less, an insane choice - how much could that possibily cost to maintain? - I'm honestly wondering if they're actively trying to drive people into Apple's ecosystem.
Nevertheless I'll never buy a Google product as long as I live. How can I trust them not to completely mothball every useful feature I bought it for?
If Siri is better than Google Assistant these days… that says more about how bad GA is, not how good Siri is. I say this as an owner of two HomePod Minis
Siri is good enough to get by, but is definitely not better than Google in my opinion (and several friends that have both Google Nest and Apple HomePod devices).
Siri is sorry she can't help, misunderstands things, or straight up ignores requests way too often.
I will say that the non-display Google devices are often more helpful than the ones with displays. The displays want to show you stuff, but the non-displays will tend to give you an answer.
e.g. "what time does walmart close" will respond with "there are several stores in your area" and then show you a list of stores with their hours, but the non-display devices will just reference the closest store and tell you when it closes.
I’ve had the Google assistant for a long time now, and it went from almost always having an answer to “sorry, I don’t understand ” or whatever the default is 30% of the time
Siri is objectively worse in almost every way imaginable. I find that hard to believe. I have both an iPhone and a work Pixel Pro, the difference between them is night and day. Siri can’t get basic spelling right, let alone accomplish complex tasks. To date it does not hold context at all, GA is far better in that regard.
My favorite problem is "Hey Siri, navigate home" proceeds to open navigation and send me to a place that isn't my home. I can up open maps manually and click on "home" and it works totally fine, but for some reason, Siri finds a place called "home" that isn't actually my home to send me to.
Of all 3, I'd say Alexa is the most practical for using at home, google one is kinda the smartest one but also is the most frustrating one - what worked yesterday will not work today or will work occasionally (exact same prompt's wording). Siri will not always respond but overall works fine within its somewhat limited scope, as compared to others (like number of integrations supported), but then again - ecosystem..
My biggest issue with Siri is intercom: at home we mostly speak other language than english, and when using intercom Siri often tries to parse what's being recorded, instead of just recording audio sample and send it verbatim.
Something like:
Me - Hey Siri, Intercom
Siri - intercom chime (not 'Aha?' of responding to just Hey Siri)
Me - *bjlkabdgkjhqwruo;fghnasd.mkfnlkjashfjkasdngjkasbdg* (doesn't matter, different language)
Siri (thinking she recognized some word) - Here are the results for what you asked..
Amazing that this post about how they are intent on delivering the "best possible user experience" just announces a ton of features they're dropping and literally not one feature they are adding.
Not that it matters to me because having bought an Amazon Echo a few years back I find these things mostly useless. It basically just does the most basic things a phone does (music, weather, news headlines), but with added friction when it misinterprets you. They are a clear example of something we rush to buy because they are "the future" before realising that the future is just the present but more tedious and with more ads.
That's modern large corporate PR for you - they can stop any kind of service and remove any features and the PR department will release that happy post parading it as a giant leap forward. What's bad is that people are so used to it nobody barely rises an eyebrow.
Not that I use voice assistants very regularly, but I decided they've become completely useless after Christmas when I was driving back home and had this (almost-verbatim) exchange with my Android around 11am:
Hey Google, remind me when I'm home to ...
"I can't remind you at a place" - pretty sure it used to be able to???
Hey Google, remind me tomorrow to ...
"Ok, what time do you want me to remind you tomorrow?"
I suspect it's org politics - but yes, in search of money and metrics.
Assistant alienated a lot of other departments from 2016-2020 with their rapid rise and rapid growth in headcount (and ability to push integrations through whether they were a good idea or not). Then they failed to make significant money, right into an economic environment where making money was prioritized much more highly than speculative researchey new markets. These changes are them trying to make themselves indispensable to other PA's metrics, so that when budgets are set, they can argue "You can't cut Assistant, look at the drop in searches & YouTube views that would result in." Same reason why they were hit harder in the layoffs than other more profitable products.
When Amazon echo came out, all the flaws of voice assistant were visible and it looked like a glorified kitchen timer but it's surprising how little they improved over the years. Nonetheless Google executives rushed to copy Alexa.
At the same time the same executives did not incorporate LLMs into the Assistant when Google invented the tech.
These layoffs should've fired all those dead-weight executives and the CEO for good measure yet we see the rank and file losing their job
That’s why I find the big tech pivot to AI so frustrating. There’s more to AI than LLM and Google and others had all the time in the world to make that. It took someone like OpenAI to show them the error of their ways.
Reminds me of legacy mobile phone makers when the iPhone launched.
I read the title of this and thought - yes - at last - Google are going to be integrating LLM capabilities with Google Assistant to make it really really useful instead of occasionally useful with a side helping of frustration at how little it understands.
Instead this seems to be a list of useful features that are being taken away!
I'm disappointed. Google employ some of the best AI/ML engineers in the world and they are making assistant worse rather than making it a showcase for what LLMs can do.
The problem is that the current crop of google assistant devices (excluding current and upcoming gen cell phones) are woefully underpowered for local models, meaning that supporting the existing install base will be expensive.
I expect that a new assistant like product (Google Bard Home or something) will be announced and existing Assistant/Home devices will be deprecated.
List of items being removed... instead of being nested under the announcement
* Playing and controlling audiobooks on Google Play Books with your voice. You can still cast audiobooks from your mobile device.
* Setting or using media alarms, music alarms, or radio alarms on Google Assistant enabled devices. You can create a custom Routine that has similar behavior or use a standard alarm.
* Accessing or managing your cookbook, transfering recipes from device to device, playing an instructional recipe video, or showing step-by-step recipes. You can use Google Assistant to search for recipes across the web and YouTube.
* Managing a stopwatch on Smart Displays and Speakers. You can still set timers and alarms.
* Using your voice to call a device or broadcast a message to your Google Family Group. You can still broadcast to devices in your home.
* Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages.
* Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.
* Using App Launcher in Google Assistant driving mode on Google Maps to read and send messages, make calls, and control media. You can still use voice control on Google Maps the same way.
* Asking to schedule or hear previously scheduled Family Bell announcements. You can create a custom Routine that has similar behavior.
* Asking to meditate with Calm. You can still ask for meditation options with media providers such as YouTube.
* Voice control for activities will no longer be available on Fitbit Sense and Versa 3 devices. You'll need to use the buttons on your device to start, stop, pause, and resume activities. You can still voice control activities on Pixel Watches.
* Viewing your sleep summaries will only be available on Google Smart Displays. You can still ask for sleep details by voice on third-party smart clocks.
* Calls made from speakers and Smart Displays will not show up with a caller ID unless you’re using Duo.
* Viewing the ambient “Commute to Work” time estimates on Smart Displays. You can still ask for commute times and get directions by voice.
* Checking personal travel itineraries by voice. You can still ask for flight status.
* Asking for information about your contacts. You can still make calls to your contacts.
* Asking to take certain actions by voice, such as send a payment, make a reservation, or post to social media. You can still ask Assistant to open your installed apps.
Glad they're making changes because it couldn't possibly be worse.
It is one of the few products I use daily that gets noticeably worse over time. Shopping lists, calendars, reminders, timers, etc use to work pretty well, but now they're absolute trash. There's a running joke in our house that one of us will ask the Google Home speaker something, it responds with either "I don't know", "I can't do that", or some bizarre non-sequitur and then we say, "just ask ChatGPT".
Instructions from first search result for "disable google assistant" might work? I found the option buried about 5 menus deep[1], but I left it on since it never triggers for me anyways, probably because I didn't set it up.
[1] Settings -> Google -> Google applications -> Search and assistant -> Google Assistant -> General -> Disable
My phone UI language is not English, the list above are my translations, actual text will likely be different.
Android indeed, or anything that's not Apple nor Amazon nor some other "all your data are belong to us".
I know there are some cool DIY hacker projects out there, maybe I should really get my hands dirty tbh? In that case, does anyone know any good links to things they tried recently? Especially with Whisper.cpp and so on it may not be TOO hard on a Raspberry Pi... right?
Note that there has been a significant layoff days ago in the assistant team to "improve Google Assistant as it explores integrating newer artificial intelligence technology into its products". Probably they're trying to replace the backend for the assistant with some LMM-based models and see those functionalities are the blockers? Of course, this could be (and should be IMO) done in more gradual migrations rather than this sudden deprecation, but who knows what those execs have in their mind.
I went into AI almost 30 years ago because I wanted to be part of building a science-fiction future where you could talk to your device just like in the movies. Now that we're almost there, I wouldn't touch a cloud-based speech interface with a ten foot pole -- had I foreseen that my sci-fi future included giving all my private information (like, say, what my voice sounds like) to a face-less billion dollar global corporation, I would have saved my time.
The Personal Computer revolution was made possible by economies of scale in industrial manufacturing of relatively simple components. Companies made money by selling widgets to as many people as possible.
By definition, AI is only made possible by advances in massive computation capacity, which is easier to achieve and improve with centralized models. This is always going to be the realm of Big Money.
In a way, AI epitomizes the shift from XX-century economics, based on manufacturing, to a XXI-century version based on extracting rent from networked digital subjects.
> By definition, AI is only made possible by advances in massive computation capacity
By what? In the words of Inigo Montoya: "The way you use that word... I do not think it means what you think it means."
Sure, we're kinda-brute-forcing things now, but that's no physical law (nor dictionary definition) declaring that digital assistants will be just captive pen-pal lamp-genies of Big Companies inside their Big Computer Rooms forever.
Perhaps someday you'll be able to grab an off-the-shelf AI core, "flash" its mutable-circuits/firmware/weights with a starting state, and pop it into an appropriate chassis for the task.
It will still be inferior to what Big Money will be able to serve, in a field where each marginal gain makes a massive qualitative difference.
AI is a buzzword for "tons of clever statistical software running hot to mimic (the output of) our complex brain processes". Big Money will always do that sort of thing better than the Taiwanese, and there is absolutely no incentive to turn a rent-extracting networked service into a widget-selling proposition, even once the field stops progressing at the current pace. Everything is now networked, so everything can access what will always essentially be "Brain as a Service" (BaaS, surely someone coined this already...).
Will we see specialized-hardware AI tuned for this or that task? Probably. Will we have portable configurable AIs? Possibly. Will either of them be as good as Big Money models, which can continuously feed on subscriptions and web-scraping at massive scale? Very, very unlikely imho.
Why would they sell you a solution when they can rent you one forever? Why acquiesce to the logic of physical laws when the laws of economics say "$$$$$!!!"?
I bought Google Home/speakers in 2018 and still use them.
Since I bought them, there have been almost 0 improvements that I've seen. A lot of potential gone to waste. That they're sunsetting features is not a surprise.
I don't know if Alexa is better, but I always tell my friends to buy those instead of Google Homes.
That it has some good qualities is why I still haven't put them in the trash. My point is they've let it rot all these years. And the potential for cool applications is huge.
Something that's kinda funny but baffling to me is the unspoken assumption that a UI with voice input should also default to voice output.
That's not how two humans work on command / response tasks, say, hanging pictures. You say, "a finger to the left and up" and I move the picture. Silent UI feedback is a curiously unplumbed idea.
Or another one: if you sit at a restaurant and ask the menu, would you rather they tediously recite it? Or hand you a paper menu while maybe giving a couple tips like "the fish pasta is awesome today"?
Supposedly, when you are voice commanding, you do so because you are unable to look at the device and visually confirm that the correct action is being undertaken.
I believe Google is heading in the wrong direction with their current approach. In my opinion, integrating LLMs and add function calling would be a significant improvement. This integration would enable the assistant to perform more complex and integrated tasks, and facilitate more meaningful conversations. Especially in scenarios where the user’s request isn’t clear or it’s uncertain which application to invoke and how, this advanced interaction capability could be incredibly beneficial.
> In my opinion, integrating LLMs and add function calling would be a significant improvement
i'm sure this is where they're headed. but what announcement reads as to me is some clever PM at google realized they don't want to announce a new LLM update to the assistant and have to include all the functionality it loses in that same announcment. so they're taking the functionality away now, and in six months they can announce a new assistant that has feature parity with the "old one"
Yep. So much double-speak and lying through the teeth here. The audacity to mention "we're investing in assistant" in an announcement about how they are decidedly de-investing is rich.
I'm quite torn on this (to be fair, I rarely use voice commands at all...I've found it's usually more effort to fix things when it gets it wrong than the cumulative sum of all the times it may save me any time whatsoever).
1. I can see how this is absolutely frustrating for someone who uses one of these commands regularly.
2. At the same time, one of the issues with voice commands relative to say keyboard input is the lack of delineation. If I hit Ctrl + Enter on my keyboard, there's no way for the computer to interpret that any differently. However, that's not the case with voice commands. It needs to keep determining (a) what I said, (b) whether it's a command or just voice, (c) whether it's a command it's supposed to execute and that's before it even figures out waht to execute. But the problem is that as the number of voice commands increases, the number of false "this is a command and not just voice" triggers will increase.
There's probably a genuine benefit for Google's users in the universe of commands being very small as long as the command that's removed is not one they use.
I've noticed several of the options are "you can use a custom routine to do this instead". Maybe Google should have included the custom routine and made it togglable.
The algorithm hype cycle keeps on turning. Voice assistants, self driving cars, and now LLMs. Each one represents an advancement, but nothing to justify the hopes and dreams people expect them to solve any minute now.
Every major company has been working on an AI assistant for the past year. Have any of them launched something useful?
I think because I have Google Fi, I kept getting Google Home products. We've got a couple of the little speakers, and a couple of the little Nest hubs. I bought a pair of Nest Home Max speakers when they were blowing them out, because people said they sounded good - they do!
All this is to say I'm fairly late to the voice assistant party. At some point my wife and I decided to give it a good try. Read up on best practices. Figured it'd been something that had been in market a good long time, maybe by now the kinks were worked out.
The search results were hit or miss. It was not clear where tasks were being saved to.
So for the last few years, here are the voice commands we've used:
ok google, what's the weather today
ok google, play white noise
ok google, stop
...and every now and then, we ask it to search for info on a topic and it fails comically. I'm not surprised to see a big shift here.
Oooh. On my Pixel, I do use "OK Google, Turn off the flashlight" - that IS helpful.
What's your success rate on white noise? I'm down in the 50s with no earthly idea of why. I get white stripes and random death metal with great regularity.
I've had a Google Home for close to ten years and I don't think I've ever used a single one of these features.
Then again, 99% of my Assistant use is kitchen timers and Spotify, and I systematically disable it on my phones. My kids are still salty about Song Quiz going away last year though.
> Managing a stopwatch on Smart Displays and Speakers. You can still set timers and alarms.
You already have a clock app, probably based on the standard Android one, and how many commands are for stopwatches?
> Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages.
What’s the big difference between sending a text message to a phone number via the messaging app, and sending an email via the Gmail app? It’s probably a single API call with a few parameters.
> Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.
> Calls made from speakers and Smart Displays will not show up with a caller ID unless you’re using Duo.
You'd think with all the noise about how awful Siri is you would see Google crushing voice integrations as a top 3 advantage. Now I'm left wondering if the reason Apple has abandoned Siri and Homepod is because they are fundamentally flawed products.
It says you can only add new events now and not reschedule...does that mean when Assistant gets the info wrong for the event I'll have to go in and manually change it? It screws up constantly, so it sounds like a headache
And here I was a few months ago, looking at the rise of Large Language Models and ...
expecting a resurgence of all these natural language assistants.
I was expecting to see the effectiveness of these assistants go through a step change for the better, and use cases exploding.
Expected the established players like Google and Amazon being able to finally justify building so many of them and selling them cheap with and uncertain pay-off all these years.
> Asking to take certain actions by voice, such as send a payment, make a reservation, or post to social media. You can still ask Assistant to open your installed apps.
This seems to imply that apps which feature 'app actions' would no longer work properly and will need to be opened via assistant separately...
Sounds like a major regression for those scenarios with needing to issue a separate command to open an app.
So perhaps it's a good day to call for contributors to add more actions to https://github.com/Stypox/dicio-android ? If Google wants to remove features, they can be replaced by something that doesn't have that problem.
I once interviewed someone working in the Google Assistant org. His job was to build technology that would detect "unusual sounds" that the microphone picks up while awaiting a "Hey Google" prompt.
I went home from that interview and threw my Google Home device in the trash.
Alexa does that too. It's the same offline wake sound model that processes Alexa and Hey Google. There's a list you can assign to do stuff (send you a notification or turn on a light or whatever)
dog barking, baby crying, snoring, glass shattering, smoke alarm beeping, co2 alarm beeping, appliance beeping, running water
Based on what I learned in that interview, there are more classifications of sounds that the product detects. Only a subset of those classifications are surfaced to the customer as part of the product.
It's frustrating to see these updates that feel like a step back rather than an improvement. Why remove useful features and irritate your users? Guess this lets Google lay off more workers who were working on these.
My primary use-case is creating reminders. For this I use (of course), the microphone in the search bar. I guess I'll have to find the next best way. Maybe it will end up being better.
Unless things have changed recently, you can't even do that if you use a workspace account. No explanation of why, it just silently fails.
I'm down to three gestures with assistant:
- play white noise. 50% success rate. Half the time it plays white stripes or some random death metal, which is great when my kids are trying to sleep.
- "ok google, stop". This works reasonably reliably.
- "I wasn't talking to you". For the 3-6 times per day when it activates for seemingly no reason and where no activation logs are ever created.
If I can find a decent internet-attached photo frame to replace it I'm out.
Actually bummed about this...I use Google assistant triggered via the Google search bar mic button on my phone all the time to manage smart home things.
To me the problem isn't lack of language understanding - it's more lack of integration with useful actions, although LLM support would certainly help with feature discovery and flexible invocation of actions.
Presumably Google Assistant is on it's way to being replaced by ChatGPT with plugins, although these would need access to phone APIs to do local stuff.
Reading this thread is kinda bizarre to me. Do people actually ... talk to their phones? Like for real, not just in cringeworthy scripted adverts? I've never used any of these voice assistant things and nor does anyone I know. It always seemed like a huge gimmick to me. Am I just in a bubble?
It's just faster to say "OK Google, navigate to work" than pulling out a keyboard and opening apps. Even though for some reason I still can't time when Google is going to start listening after all these years, and have to repeat myself a lot. I think it was fine-tuned for American voices at first and got worse when expanded worldwide.
Although I hate my Audi Q7, one thing I do like is that you can hold the voice command button on the steering wheel and tell android auto what you want to do (like go home, or play your music of choice).
Simple things through voice are good, and a lot better than fiddling with your phone while you're trying to drive.
Because I got to where I am by saying "restaurants near me" or "ice skating near me" and I don't know the way back. Also when I'm in a different state for a few weeks I sometimes set "work" to the place I'm staying.
I definitely exist in a bubble, but it's especially useful while driving. Or for searches "Hey Siri, what is the capital of Zambia?" is faster than typing it, and you don't even need to reach for your phone. (Of course Siri is awful and can barely do basic things.)
s.o. and i both own iphones but never talk to siri. recently we spent a week at an airbnb with an alexa thing so we used it for music and couple more stuff, it was sometimes good, other times so bad it was funny
anyway, we came back home and still don't use siri
I was really hoping something had forced Google to allow the full disabling of the assistant. I really don't find it useful and accidentally trigger it more often than I care to admit.
I've already decided that I'm done with Google's smart assistant stuff in any case. I have a Google Home with a screen in my kitchen and the most-used feature (aside from just existing as a photo frame) was an integration with a really useful shopping list app called AnyList. It certainly wasn't complex, we'd say "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list" and it would do it. But it was very useful: I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing. If it had to wait until I was done for me to pull out my phone I'd inevitably forget.
Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides (which naturally has way fewer features than AnyList). They've never provided even the remotest defense for why they've removed it, it's very obviously to lock us into the Google ecosystem. So our Google Home is now a glorified photo frame that plays music from time to time (and even then prioritizes cover versions and YouTube videos over actual songs, presumably because $$$)