Over the last few years, I swear google assistant has slowly gotten worse, which is crazy considering how much better AI has gotten generally. But in the last few months it's absolutely fallen into being total trash.
- Constantly misunderstanding commands
- Listening long after we're done talking to it, then getting confused by our private conversations and trying to play something on the TV or something insane
- When we ask it to play a song it very frequently plays something totally unrelated. Why can't it just ask "did you mean ..??" for example instead of guessing?
- Asking to play music on audio groups just totally stopped working and if I want to play on multiple speakers at once I have to select them manually in the home app
- Frequently stuff plays in other rooms randomly
- Conversations with the new Gemini beta are totally insane. It's initial answers are ok, but then following up with a clarification or related question never seems to work (although it always is listening when you don't actually want it to)
- The fact that you can't entirely turn off listening after it answers seems straight up predatory. Why is there no "only respond when the user says 'hey google' first"? Because some evil MBA at google doesn't want what users want?
- We got a new Nest Hub because we thought it would sound and hear better - but it does not! The old mini we had was strangely much better at listening and the audio output was almost as good.
I'm sorry if my comment seems upset - I am upset! I guess I never expected this platform to get worse (a lot worse) over the years. I want to bail on Google so bad but at this point we have doorbell, multiple cameras, wifi, and like 5 of these hubs in kitchen, garage, kids rooms, etc, etc.
Google, what is going on with you? Get it together please!
(I know what happened - some smarty pants dev convinced everyone that his awesome new architecture was going to be so much better. But it was a huge change, impossible to test all at once, so fancy that no one could really understand how it all worked, and now google has crapped the bed. I don't want to switch to another ecosystem, but if this doesn't improve in the next few months I'll have no choice (probably along with a few million other users)
