2/10, only keeping it because it was a gift. This is partly a review of the hub, partly of the assistant itself.
Here's why:
- does not integrate with other google services. If I am driving home and share my location with my wife she'll get an email, but there is no way to say "hey google, announce my trip on Nest Hub". I was very surprised to find that this doesn't work. I can't even say "announce my ETA" - I have to manually tell it the ETA. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
- does not integrate with secure messaging services. This is partly signal/whatsapps fault, but in our case it means we can't use the hub for messaging at all.
- no way to lock it to household voices. Anyone can say hey google and use the hub. I don't want that. We've ended up just leaving the mic off all the time unless we specifically want to use it which isn't often due to the inconvenience. It basically defeats the purpose of the thing.
- it's dumb as a rock. I'm surprised there is still no bard integration. The vast majority of requests are met with "I googled that for you" - and that includes questions about google assistant! It doesn't even know how to search it's own help database which is extremely frustrating.
- settings are horribly complex. I have to go through layers upon layers of settings to get anything done and the assistant is too dumb to understand most requests or help me out in any way. The bigger problem is that often I know what I want to achieve but don't know what the setting would be called or what category it would be under. Meaning:
- Bing chat and ChatGPT apps are both 10x better at helping me set up assistant and the hub than assistant itself. Like... that should not be the case.
So in the end we only use it for playing music and setting timers, and maybe occasionally pulling up a recipe. For everything else - announcements, watching or controlling the TV, sending messages, calling people, sharing trip details, ordering things, turning on/off lights (other than when we're on holiday), etc. etc., it's much easier and faster to do things in other ways. And there's no way I'm trusting it to book anything. It's just too dumb and unintegrated to be useful. At this point I'm wishing I was a siri/apple guy.
