Why even bother having it at all anymore. Can’t use it through Bluetooth, it’s slow, can’t hardly handle any tasks…
Google has completely lost the plot with their services.
Downdate
Oh don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be back behind a paywall soon enough.
I wonder if they did this due to security vulnerabilities and it’s just temporary? If not, it definitely makes it virtually worthless if they plan to keep it permanent.
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To me this is reading more like you can no longer turn those options off and they are automatically enabled. It literally says your bluetooth mic will be used by default not that you can’t use it through bluetooth.
Instead I understand this that basically everything you ask with the phone in your pocket will be “to answer this question you need to unlock your phone” (no, I don’t want to enable and train voice match)
My sound search hasn’t worked in a very long time. One day there was an update, and it just stopped trying. It immediately says Unable to find a match. Based on all the forums I went through, I’m not alone with this issue.
Oh glad to know I’m not the only one. There’s a song that plays often at work that I’m just dying to know the name of but every time I try, Google tells me it’s unable to connect.
That’s weird. I have a pixel 6a and it tells me on my lock screen and pull down notification bar what’s playing at all times. I don’t know if that’s just a pixel thing but maybe try enabling that option if you have it?
Yeah that’s a Pixel feature unfortunately, unrelated to Google Assistant.
Yes I’ve noticed this on my devices now for awhile. I gave up and downloaded a separate app instead.
They always make services worse before they end them. Maybe instead of incorporating ai they will release a new, not compatible with existing hardware, assistant and they are moving teams around.
It’s that they’re pulling resources away from assistant and preparing to launch Bard in its place.
They’re slowly phasing out Google assistant in an attempt to kill it.
My bet is that they’re trimming down its complexity so they can more easily/fully integrate it with Bard: https://blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-bard-generative-ai/
Google usually replaces something well built out with someone very incomplete.
Maybe their game here is to trim it to hell so Bard doesn’t look so comparatively incomplete?
They’re not that kind of self-aware internally, from what I’ve managed to gather from interviews and blogs by ex-Googlers.
They think they’re rewriting stuff to upgrade in one way or another based on internal pain points. The fact is, external criticism, even from real users, just doesn’t penetrate the Google social bubble unless it’s coming from another giant corporation or major government.
Gutting it is more like, but yeah I gather they’re doing something like this.
They’ve rendered my Google smart speaker mostly useless except as a glorified hands free on/off switch for lights and tv. I used to be able to add items to my shopping list on Bring via voice command, and then suddenly one day it stopped working because they got rid of the tool that enabled that function (I’m not using their shitty lists app instead). I also found out that a tracking app that I use for noting down baby feeding times and diapers used to have voice command functionality until, you guessed it, Google axed that feature. It worked perfectly well before, I’m guessing they didn’t want to pay people to maintain it.
I mostly used it for bring. Back in summer 2023 they nixed the API so I gather a lot of API integrations have stopped working.
Overall the quality of the product has gone down too. It doesn’t recognise me as well as it used to, and it very rarely attempts to give answers, usually you just get a “sorry I don’t understand” instead.
What’s really amusing to me is that HomeKit and Siri has become more reliable than Nest and Google Assistant is. Siri used to be laughable, and while it still doesn’t do as much as GA used to do, it is much smoother and rarely gives me BS answers. The only time I get annoyed with Siri is when it insists I unlock my phone for it to answer.
Google assistant barely even does lights for me anymore. It usually puts on some rubbish podcast instead. Or it cancels all alarms. Absolute garbage.
Looks like they’re removing the toggle making it always enabled, probably because nobody used the phone mic while connected via Bluetooth
In honesty, many of the changes announced seem to remove redundancies
Surely this is not related to recent major layoff in Google Assistant division, right?
I don’t understand why google is still worth so much money, they are a trash company that really isn’t trying to improve any of its products. It just periodically threatens its workers with job cuts and continues to serve up crap to its customers.
That’s because you don’t understand what business Google is actually in. They’re an ad company. They sell and serve ads. Everything else is just ways to better target and serve ads. All those “products”? Those aren’t revenue streams to them, they’re incidental costs of the ads that are their actual product.
I understand that, but they aren’t even that functional at doing that. They have ruined their products so much that it is threatening the ad value of the ads they sell I imagine. Google search is awful now and there is a very real chance people will stop using it for the first time in like a decade.
Those “ruined” products handily control huge chunks of the market. So from that perspective, they’re not “ruined” at all. They’re perfect.
Google search is awful now and there is a very real chance people will stop using it for the first time in like a decade.
Sure, but the one time someone brought actual empirical data into this discussion, it showed that while Google results did get worse, they got less worse than the ones of competing products like DDG (or Bing, which interestingly didn’t share results with DDG, indicating that those must have expanded how much they use their own index).
Does that mean Google is better? No, they’re still worse off. But if anything they made gains comparatively speaking, and what actually happened is that all search engines got worse because search-engine-spam-avoidance got defeated in huge parts.
Those “ruined” products handily control huge chunks of the market. So from that perspective, they’re not “ruined” at all. They’re perfect.
They control the market because Google, like most too-big-too-fail massive corporations, buys out any serious competitors and uses its dominant size to destroy the threat of competition before it can actually challenge them to make better products. Yes Google isn’t a monopoly in any of its industries but it doesn’t need to be since most of the large competitors they face are thinking the same way they are, why fight when we can enjoy our cake and do nothing?
Just because google products are widely used doesn’t mean they are good, it means people think they are the best option or can’t be bothered to switch which is a very very different thing.
My point was more that the products aren’t ruined from the perspective of their intended design. They’re not meant as products to be of maximum usefulness to the customer, rather to capture and control the largest share of the market.
they aren’t even that functional at doing that
They’re actually amazing at it. The measure of success for an advertising company is selling ad space.
“Oh shit we should probably charge a subscription for some of these features. Quick remove em so they don’t notice”
But it sounds like they’re just removing the ability to disable those features, not the features?
They want out and haven’t found a way to make money off of voice assistant. They’re just slowly killing it.
It’s part of why I’m pushing hard on my HA and hoping their voice efforts at least give me a solid voice experience at home.
HA = Home Assistant
Edit to say: I get that people are frustrated that previously good (mostly) free solutions are going away. I’m not defending tech, but I do see their business need here. Google has long lost my trust anyhow.
I’m not upset by the down votes, but 8 do wonder what they mean.
To me the only safe thing to do is pull back and build my own. Raspberry Pis aren’t expensive.
never forget
I never will. I loved Google Now. It legitimately felt like the future when it came out. So much more useful than the dumbass article and product sales feed it is now.
I noticed that Hey Google wasn’t working from the lock screen anymore. Pretty annoying.
does that help with privacy at all? would that mean someone can’t pick up your locked phone and ask it questions like “who did I recently call”?
If the voice doesn’t match the account owner, it doesn’t give out any personal info. If you use somebody else’s Assistant, you can only get general search results or media payback, typically.
Honestly while Google is far ahead of Amazon here, they still recognize like 9 out of 10 voices as the “owner”. Just not 10 out of 10 like Alexa does, which is utterly useless and will happily recognize a cat meowing as its trigger and allow it to unlock the front door. >.>
I have a couple of phones in use. 1 never answers which is fine as I have a display too, but the other answers every time I can do that if you unlock your device first.
Yeah, after the update, it only answers if I unlock my phone. It’s not as convenient as it was before.
