I Fired Google

     "Hey Google, call my wife"

                           ------> Immediately calls wife

     "Hey Google, call my wife"

                           --50%-> "Is that XXXXXX?"

                           --25%-> Immediately calls wife

                           --20%-> "I'm sorry, I couldn't find a contact saved as 'wife'" 

                           --05%-> Immediately calls someone different from my wife

PMs keep trying to make them "smarter," and it just makes the core user journeys worse.

Surely they think they're inventing cars when we're griping about buggy whips. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually want them for.

Pre-gemini, you knew what you would get, basically the structured snippets that would appear at the top of the search results.

Now it's much more verbose.

My biggest gripe is that it basically stopped listening to me, since "upgrading" to Gemini, which is frustrating because I've used it to control the Hue lights for the past decade.

It listens to my partner though, so after it fails to listen to me, I have to ask her to ask Google to adjust the fing lights.

Welp

It also now seems to trigger its own barge-in about 50% of the time. It'll start reading the first syllable of a message, apparently confuse itself talking for me saying something, then just follow that with silence "listening" for my response until I physically have to hit the back button on the car.

That said I feel like no matter the music service it's a 50/50 shot each time if it plays the song I want. No matter how many times before I've played it or asked for it.

The latest Gemini update for Android Auto also absolutely ruined the voice control for Waze. It was already bad, but now Android Auto is basically unusable by voice.

Navigation is OK but now for music, everytime I ask it to play a song, it warns me it can't do that on Spotify Free tier (I have a subscription?).

Then it goes ahead and plays the wrong song anyway.

I do not care about whatever stupid feature you want to build engagement around. Do what I asked you to do and then shut up.

And don't get me started on the Alexa Show that had the audacity to display ads.

When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”

Do you have a better recommendation of a smart speaker that can play spotify, youtube music, or tidal?

> The closest I could get to punching Google in the ear and ripping out its nose hairs.

As if giving more money to another shitty megacorp for another frustrating device is going to make any difference to the first shitty megacorp.

I'm just waiting for Google to send the email with the title like "An update about Assistant's future" to make the clock e-waste. On the phone I tried Gemini but that's slower because it needs a brain for simple text parsing..

I was amazed at my own level of anger at that. It was just a voice in my ears but I reacted to it viscerally like it was an assault. It didn't help that it was in the middle of a sequence of it telling one lie after another, like "yes, I can disconnect this conversation." Maybe what I had is a natural reaction to having a lying clueless asshole refuse to go away or shut up, which I haven't otherwise had to deal with lately.

But more importantly... screens were put in more expensive cars first, and slowly trickled down to budget cars. It's a very weak argument that it was done for cost reasons. Screens are flashy and impress people during their 5 minute test drive. "Wow! Think of all the things I can do in my car that I couldn't do with a knob for changing fan speed." Sure, living with those screens tends to be a bit less enjoyable than those first impressions lead you to believe, but bright colorful animated screens helped to sell cars. If they're actually less expensive than knobs and buttons, that's just a bonus for the manufacturers.

Also keep in mind, when screens first appeared in (expensive) cars, they weren't actually cheaper than the knobs and buttons they replaced. Technology is, sorry was getting cheaper per unit of performance over time. Screens became commonplace and inexpensive to put in cars, but I suspect they were ten times more expensive than all the knobs and levers they replaced when they started appearing in luxury cars.

Having used Google home assistant since it came out for all the things that it's good for, and watched its quality fluctuate, I find I really have to be more careful nowadays when I ask it questions because it can go overboard more easily.

Is there a term in AI research where it underappreciates the specificity that is being asked for?

Perhaps the AI could be default prompted, "you are a kitchen AI assistant and should tend to answer in facts and details and that are relevant to the current moment."

a) because some of them have semi-decent speakers for music

b) because it's nice not to have to pull out your phone (especially while cooking)

https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-e...

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...

They rolled it back though afaik because the whole idea was a comically evil idea.