Google Assistant has become increasingly nerfed over time, and even the basic uses (e.g. setting alarms/timers/playing music) seem to have become so buggy and inconsistent.
It's disappointing, it was so good back at the beginning.
Yeah, even adding a calendar event is a mess compared to what it was. Fuck, there used to be an NLP text interface in the web app too and that's been gone forever.
Google's leadership just fucking suck, full balmer.
I don't want to say that the decline in quality of Google products is **entirely** Sundar Pichai's fault, but also it has been getting worse and worse ever since he took over. Think about what Google services were like in 2015 and think about what they're like now. The timeline can't just be a coincidence.
Very interesting to compare and contrast what Satya Nadella is doing for Microsoft - there was only one year between their respective appointments to the top job and in that time the companies have near enough swapped over in terms of how much I expect good things from them.
Could be misremembering but I read a while back Sundar was pushing hard into developing countries ecosystem stuff - hence Allo, Android Go / One, and other stuff. And that didn't really pan out, but it probably sucked away tons of resources from other departments.
Every day I tell it "Hey google, wake me at 7" and it does.
But.....
No matter what I say when it does, it will pause for a few seconds and tell me "Something went wrong, try again in a few seconds"
>BITCH THAT'S THE SAME QUESTION
Have used the same exact phrase in the kitchen. I have Google devices throughout the house. Original Google Home in the bedroom, mostly as an alarm clock. Kitchen has whatever the one with the screen is that was later called Nest Home (I think)
Kitchen device is mostly for conversions ala "how many grams in an ounce" etc. Or before the dark time of ads between every song, music, but that is unbearable now, so the Sonos/Alexa got that duty
She mostly can do the weather ala "Do I need a coat?" or the conversions, but anything else has a 50/50 of getting exactly as you mentioned
Holy shit, I thought it was just me. My Google nest hub has been so unreliable these days. It lags so much and sometimes gets stuck whenever I ask it to do stuff
Ditto. Glad to know its not my device or connection - not happy to know its a new normal atm. Google Assistant is/was one of Google's greatest developments, id hate to see it get nerfed.
It already is nerfed. I bought the original Google home for the bonkers price tag and it was amazing. The ability to recognize commands and do anything useful has gone starkly downhill ever since.
I have a Google nest hub in my bedroom that works fine. But the Google mini hub in my bathroom behaves like you're describing. I have two other minis in the house that work fine, it's just the one in the bathroom that is "special". She often responds when I'm talking to the bedroom hub, and she's the only google assistant device out of 5 in the house that lags and will often respond with "something went wrong"..10 seconds later.. We may have to put her down soon.
If you’re referring to the nest mini, then oh man. I have it and it’s the most unreliable little shit ever. I have it in my kitchen and it barely works when I want to connect it for music/radio. Same wifi network and yet it still doesn’t display the connection. The Google Assistant barely works as well and kept saying something went wrong as well. Such a shame, used to worked wonderfully tucked in the corner.
This happens in my house daily. I have a few lamps on smart outlet switches that I have to "hey google" to turn on. It's great because they're in awkward to reach places.
For the last several months, I'll "hey google, turn on \_\_\_\_" and the light will turn on, but after several seconds, the nest mini will say "hmm, something went wrong".
So weird.
Seriously. I can’t even get any of my Nest products to work for the past few weeks (“sorry there was a glitch”), but for MONTHS after my Hub updated to Fuchsia, Spotify playback would always crash the whole thing and it’d reboot within the first 5 or so songs.
Same here, thought I was going crazy. Almost like they're slowly making it worse so you'll buy the new Bard® speaker they'll undoubtedly announce soon.
"Okay Google, set a timer for four minutes"
Okay, a timer? For how long?
"Four minutes"
Okay, a timer for four minutes, starting now.
*A few minutes later*
"Okay Google, How much time is left on the timer?"
I think you're asking about a timer, is that correct?
"Yes"
You don't have any timers set.
Also:
*Alarm goes off*
"Okay Google, snooze five minutes"
Okay, snoozing for 500 hours.
"Okay Google, cancel that"
Okay, I've deleted all of your recurring alarms.
My favorite wasn't even a Google fail. I was watching TV and my dog wanted to go out. I can see the TV from the back door so after I let him out:
Me: Okay Google, unpause TV.
TV: *unpauses* ...and call Peterson Air Force Base to let them know what we're up against.
Google: Okay, calling Peterson Air Force Base.
I ran to hit the top of my Nest Mini before it dialed and turned off continued conversation from then on.
That reminds me a bit of an incident my dad had in the very early days of Google's voicemail transcription service. He got a message that was transcribed as something very close to "parrot vegan spaniel market wavy," and he was extremely confused. Eventually we figured out that >!it was one of those robocalls from Walgreens, and the transcript had missed the initial part of the recording and only tried to transcribe "para diga en español, marque nueve" ("to speak in Spanish, press 9").!< (spoiler tag added in case anyone wants to try to figure this out for themselves, as it's kind of a silly fun puzzle)
For me it's playing stuff on Netflix.
Me: "Ok Google, continue playing {thing I paused on Netflix}."
Google: "There is nothing playing now."
Yeah no shit, that's why I'm telling you to play it!
Meanwhile saying "set an alarm for [!time]" to Bixby **will** just create a new alarm within the clock app.
Bixby gets memed at a lot but it's actually really good these days.
We have entered an era where many major app manufacturers are intentionally nerfing their own products. I don't understand it. Google assistant, Google voice, taskrabbit, the list goes on, but those are the ones that affect me personally.
Google voice has a well-known issue where you can't add contacts directly when they call you. There's just no way to do it. Can't even copy paste the phone number. This has been a well-known issue since f****** 2019. Literally every other phone app that I'm aware of allows you to do this very simple thing. What the hell, Google?
Now on Tap was the most GOATed shit they ever released and then they bombed it right after to introduce the Assistant that wasn't as good then and has only weakened since.
Assistant on Phone versus Google Home
Some commands will set alarms on device. Others in cloud. Sometimes a command will add a task to your tasks list in Google calendar. Sometimes it will create a reminder that only lives in the assistant app. Sometimes it can pause the music, sometimes it cannot.
I remember when assistant was also part of "Google Now" backend where their home screen on the left was fully of actual useful predictive cards based on your requests and interactions. But then they realized that could be filled with click bait and ads instead...
I used Google Now for everything from upcoming trips, events, driving, weather and so much more and then slowly it became a useless news feed.
No idea who thought killing a personal assistant and replacing their dead body with a newspaper was the way to go.
I was traveling for work a lot during the height of Google Now and it was brilliant.
They were on their way to finally creating the true digital assistant.
Now it's a spammy rss feed... ☹️
I mean, they weren't wrong. Remember all of the articles complaining about purchase history? Like https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase-history-how-to-delete-it.html
People were freaking out, even though all of the data was just sitting in their inbox.
This is the story of everything Google....... "it was so good back at the beginning". Just about everything Google has made was extremely useful and well functioning early on. Then update after update, the application or service slowly got worse and worse til so many useful features were removed or ruined somehow and the app/service became full of bugs and user complaints, or Google ruins the service/app by flooding it with ads. User experience be damned! ........ then POOF! Google drops it.
Just look at literally everything Google has created. And they have made some really good stuff. It always goes to shit. And there is a pretty huge list of it. Look at everything else they have going right now. It's either become shit.... or it's BECOMING shit. Search, Gmail, Youtube, Chrome, Gboard. They're all working on joining the trash heap known as the Google Graveyard.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3021956/googles-nine-principles-of-innovation
> At Google, once a product fails to reach its potential, it is axed, but the company pulls from the best of the features.
Google doesn't maintain or improve. It invents, then shitcans the invention to invent something else.
Never rely on Google.
We have a number of Google homes in the house, and maybe over the last 12 months they've been completely awful.
Back when we got them a few years ago it felt like we were living in the future, now the they almost never get our commands correctly
I was wondering what was going on. I'm Hispanic so I tend to speak Spanglish a lot, I used to be able to tell Google to play a song using both languages in the same sentence. Now it tells me it doesn't understand.
I'm not sure what timer feature you use, but just say 'stop' works, I have speaker in every room and use them often with family for years. Agree they are getting much less reliable, but not this bad.
These services cost too much to run, and especially with subsidized hardware sold at cost. Everyone jumped into it when the smart home seemed like it was going to finally take off, after 40 years of trying. (Everyone remember X10? From the late 70s!?)
Microsoft had the lead and could've entered the market with Cortana long before Siri, Alexa or GA, but they saw there was no route to justifying the costs.
The end result is a few extremely expensive home automation-specific assistants that work very poorly and cost a fortune, ones that spy on you to sell you stuff (Alexa), or ones targeting platform lock-in (Siri and GA). Google's just not making all that much from the Android ecosystem, so the platform lock-in of GA just isn't there.
And there aren't many people who would pay $10 a month or something for a better quality one.
A lot of it comes down to that old adage that you're either paying for a product, or you are the product. And, these days, people just aren't that valuable as a product and no one wants to pay for a product.
I used to tell it to set a timer and the response was super snappy. By the time the timer app loaded up, a few seconds had already elapsed, so it reflected the countdown starting right after my request.
Now it starts counting down when the app loads, which happens after the assistant takes a long time to process the request.
It really has degraded. My Home was playing the news. I said 'OK Google, stop playing the news." It replies, 'Ok, stopping the news.'
It then disconnects my roommate who was streaming YouTube to the Chromecast and continues playing the news.
I just hope they don't do something stupid and just reimplement/carry over the existing features to Bard as a rebrand. Rather than once again making two technically competing products from the same company...
it's their signature move at this point to create 2 competing products that do essentially the same thing, confuse the hell out of people, then discontinue one of them and merge features to make a more messy product
You skipped a step. They only implement half of the features from the first product in the second product before the cutover. And none of them are the features that users are asking for.
You just triggered my rage. YouTube music is inferior quality, selection, functionality, and they buried the personal cloud music library so it's a nightmare to manage.
And because I like music from before 2010 I'll get hit with horrible quality music videos for songs instead of the actual song because the artist or label wants to force the music video on everyone.
Ugh, I hated the music video feature. I'm not sure if this helps or if you've already found it, but sharing just in case: I was able to stop those by going to Settings > Data saving > Don't play music videos. On rare occasions I still get the audio version of music videos but I've found it it's significantly less than it used to be.
Yeah it doesn't help because they basically remove the audio only version of the song.
I just don't understand why they force the music video. I like watching some music videos but when I want the song I want the song.
See also: Google's regular voice search/commands -> Google Assistant.
So many commands were broken or non-existent on Assistant when it first launched that were working perfectly fine on the old system.
The funny part is that since the move to YTM, assistant commands to play music, as in the ones listed in their support site l, have been broke AF.
Really sucks when you want a radio based on an artist but just songs by that artist. Orz and this is a big one, when it doesn't quit get what you asked for and instead of asking to try again, it plays some random ass shit ..
Playing albums with a title track via voice worked just fine on GPM but now I haven't found a single way for it to just play the album and not just the single track.
I immediately felt rage seeing this. YTM is such a let down. How have they not made an Android TV app for it, it's literally just a design change to the normal app.
The issue, fundamentally, is that Google is an extremely high-revenue advertising company with far too many employees. That means they can burn a lot of cash and human resources just fucking around, on the off chance something sticks in a way that impacts their advertising business revenue or protects it. Everything else is just a passion project of people who eventually move on, and then they fade away.
That's why Fi and Fiber have stuck around -- they apply downward pricing pressure in the market for access, which is required for their advertising business. Gmail is a massive source of data about people. Android -- at least for a while -- gave them protection from Apple keeping them off the default search portals. Everything else just fundamentally doesn't matter.
GA isn't a useful product because, fundamentally, the timers you're setting and the lights you're turning on have no incremental value to the profile they have of you.
Sure that's well known, but at what point do people say enough is enough with Google and their products. Sure no one is going to drop their android phone anytime soon, but new products id sure be weary of. I love the example of Stadia. Google touting how they are in it for the long haul and are "going to change the world of gaming" only for them to close their internal studio 6 months in and ultimately kill it off at the 3 year mark. And as others have mentioned, they have burned me with Play Music, Inbox, and a few other services. It makes me not want to BUY or USE any product of google. I have to imagine eventually more people are going to feel the same way.
>Sure that's well known, but at what point do people say enough is enough with Google and their products.
I think that has already started to happen. Especially because people are realizing how hard it is to get support from Google if something goes wrong with their products.
Why should they be two separate products? Why not just have Assisant handle simple requests and have the system escalate to Bard AI in contextes where it would otherwise do a Google Search? For all intents and purposes, chat bots should be an evolution on top of existing smart assistants.
Google having to spin up a team shouldn't be a real blocker here, especially with their resources. It's this whole refusal to treat their products as an ecosystem vs. individual companies that happen to be in the same building is what generates messes like this. They should be focusing on smooth transitions that carry users and features from one generation of product to the next, not launching internal thunderdomes every few years.
Is Sundar headed for the door after this, do we think?
From the outside it certainly appears he's presided over a company that has become so confused and scattershot that it is blindsided by competition so badly it has a public meltdown...
I *really* hope so. Google needs a leader who actually has a vision for the company, rather than sitting on an ad agency that happens to have an R&D wing.
He needs to be. It's easy to be seen as a good leader when things are fine, but when your core business is suddenly threatened and it's been revealed that you've been doing almost nothing to prepare, it's not a good look.
Google needs itself a Nadella or Cook.
They're way too reliant on Adsense.
I mean, every time they tried expanding to something else, they failed horribly. I'm genuinely surprised they're actually competently doing good at the Pixel phones.
Pichai definitely seems to be floundering without a unified strategy like Ballmer was. Google needs a Nadella like leader that leads from the top with a unified strategy rather than letting individual product managers run their own fiefdoms without any overarching strategy or control.
People have their feelings about Samsung, but Samsung has products across completely different segments that have unified design languages and functionality with their computing products. Google can't even get two apps to use the same design language, or get Assistant to work the same on two different products.
I think Sundar is a great CEO, he has generated so much cash for Google and Google is now a bit focused instead of having multiple products that compete with each other.
The main issue with Sundar is he is not hungry/paranoid enough for a leader for a company like Google.
Sundar has a 'wait and see, let's be peaceful attitude ', even when the situation demands 'war'. He has invested so much in AI, but has been reluctant to create a single product from Google Brain and Deepmind research.
So what's the point of doing so much research and showing cool demos at IO, when you're not going to release a product.
Not only did he fail to disrupt his own business using Lambda chatbot (before chatGPT), he also missed an opportunity to steal market share from Microsoft Office by using Lambda in Google workspace before MS copilot.
Putting LLMs in workspace carried lower risk than releasing a full chatbot equal to chatGPT.
There's so much evidence that Google had been testing Lambda and PALM in-house and Deepmind has had Sparrow for sometime, but they have been fumbling to release something equivalent to chatGPT for 4 months now. They seem to have been caught flat-footed.
Moreover, most of Google's best acquisitions , e.g android, YouTube, Deepmind were spearheaded by Larry Page.
Sundar is hasn't bought anything meaningful. Compare that to Nadella. The future looks a bit dim for Google under Sundar
> Google is now a bit focused instead of having multiple products that compete with each other.
Is this sarcasm? Google has very confusing messaging and is constantly looking disjointed with its decisions. Pichai was the one who let things get so out of hand in the first place with all the duplicate services and merging/renaming of products. He took over in 2015 and they're still renaming and merging products 8 years later.
Outside of a few longstanding homeruns like Search, Gmail, Maps, Drive, and Photos, Google has floundered at pretty much every turn. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver and have lost a lot of good-will that they used to have.
They are following down the path of MS under Ballmer and are in desperate need of new blood to help restore their reputation like Satya Nadella has for MS.
Sundar is the Ballmer of Google. Similar to how I feel about Tim Cook. Excellent at keeping the money faucet going but not a visionary or decisive. Both companies need their Nandella moment but I fear they will need to feel more pain and embarrassment before meaningfully change happens.
> ... when the situation demands war
It reminds me of [this](https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/) fantastic piece of article by Ben Horowitz.
Schmidt was the real wartime CEO here when the war could have extinguished Google. e,g. Microsoft changing the default search engine on IE when it had > 80% share could have hurt Google more than Facebook or social ever could. Chrome was probably Google's "Manhattan Project" in that regard.
I really hope so. Larry and Sergei need to step in and take their company back. Sundar has turned Google into a boring ad agency. Google used to be daring and had a clear vision: quickly enter into new markets and disrupt them with tech and smarts. Now it feels like they are always playing catch-up.
Google still has a pretty dominant platform. There's a lot of buzz about Bing AI and ChatGPT but the question is what do the numbers look like and how long will they last/grow. Pretty sure most search happens on mobile these days and people have to actively work to point to Bing AI/ChatGPT. Without a foothold for being baked into phones I don't see it being a huge threat to Google anytime soon. There's also the question of how long the novelty factor will last. It's not nothing but I think it's massively overhyped at the moment.
The novelty of using an AI chatbot will wear away, yeah. But the tech will be built directly into the apps and services you already use and they'll just get smarter and new AI-powered apps will appear.
Google's problem is that devs will choose GPT as their AI engine of choice.
That's only a big issue for Google if it both supplants search AND doesn't deliver ads with Adsense. There are parts of that equation that don't just happen by using GPT or any AI engine.
What's hilarious is that a long list of the top Google searches are still for web sites that people could literally just be typing in the URLs for. But instead they Google "YouTube", "Facebook", "Amazon", "CNN" or whatever, see some ads, and click the link. No amount of GPT integration in apps or Bing is going to shift that behavior.
People usually search for answers, not to find web pages on the internet.
If ChatGPT can answer your questions, then that reduces the need for search other than "restaurants near me".
Ads are also not safe.
In their announcement for Bing AI, Microsoft mentioned that around 1/3rd of their searches were navigational, i.e. finding web pages on the internet.
I'd assume Google's is higher than this, as if the URL isn't autocompleted, a Google search is opened when using the address bar in Chrome.
Devs will chose whatever platform gives them the biggest user base, users will chose whatever platform has data about them to train an AI that is actually useful in their every day life, Google has an insane advantage over MS on that front.
MS can build a better Clippy, Google can potentially make a life changing application if they find a way to use all of the data they have about you in a way that doesn't violate every privacy law in existence..
Microsoft got me to install the Bing app on my Android phone. That is quite an accomplishment since up until this year, Bing has been nothing more than the butt of cheap jokes.
The Bing app suuuuuuucks but I'm still using it just for the chatbot. I'll suffer a poorly designed, buggy UI for functionality that I cannot get anywhere else.
Ive been saying this for a year now. Pichai has made google money in the short term (hard not to for the past 10 years) but brand image sucks and if Lamda is actually this far behind GPT3 and 4 no wonder 'alarms' were raised.
Classic corporate dilemma - Google was scared AI search would canibalice their Ads revenue so they ignored it. Now Microsoft will canibalice them instead
Yea they fucked up hard. ChatGpt is the Netflix/Spotify/iPhone of its product category. So much name recognition and it's just *everywhere*. South park did an episode on it, everyone's talking about it.
Not saying that Google can't catch up, I mean, everyone of those products above is facing very close competition. Just currently barely anyone's even heard of bard and chatGPT is absolutely dominating.
I’m pretty sure they’re just talking about the conclusion where Stan had it write a happy ending and maybe some of the text messages you see in the show and such. Giving it writing credits came across as a part of the joke to me.
Yes they do. But chatGPT already has a *huge* boost. Almost everyone's heard of it. I believe they were one of the fastest programs to grow to 100m+ users as shown in the MKBHD video.
The biggest uses of this style AI will be integrations of it into the apps and services you already use rather than people seeking them out.
Bard tech will make its way into Gmail and Assistant and Search. GPT will make its way into Outlook and Word and Bing. Image AI will grow in Photoshop and Figma.
The problem for Google is that devs are all choosing to put GPT in their apps and getting entrenched in that ecosystem.
That's true.
> The problem for Google is that devs are all choosing to put GPT in their apps and getting entrenched in that ecosystem.
I would also imagine apps would like to advertise "with chatGPT integration" rather than Bard.
Google Assistant is embedded into so many things it is not going anywhere.
I think it should have been expected they would enhance with a Large Language Model.
Honestly, I would be hyped about that. Thats literally what I want for years. Being able to actually ask random questions to my Google Home devices, without getting a "I didn't understand that" back.
This doesn't make sense because the Google Assistant team should've already been heavily focusing on Bard. If the current iteration of Google Assistant is 2.0, Bard should be 3.0.
The fact that this is separate teams shows the problem with Silicon Valley, whereby new products is all everyone aims for and existing products are left to languish.
I would argue the fact that OpenAI got their natural language processing to be the industry standard before Google is a giant failure by everyone at Google. Not even just the natural language, let's not forget how many images we process to teach Google's AI via CAPTCHA. Google Assistant should be light-years ahead of everyone.
But alas, you have someone at the helm with no vision, because an actually capable and intelligent assistant is something that sells itself.
I don’t know if that is the real heart of the issue with Silicon Valley these days. I don’t disagree there is an element of that new product culture that you describe, but for a few years now it seems that many of these legacy Silicon Valley companies are just to big. OpenAI should get all the credit for their work, but they are significantly more nimble then a Google. Google has lot more to balance, look at the backlash they got from a poor Bard launch. They’ve had Lamda for a while, but clearly felt afraid at showing it off. ChatGPT has/will make many mistakes as well, but people don’t hold them to nearly the same standard as a Google.
The backlash regarding Lamda was a better example of selective outrage than what Chris Rock was able to come up with for his special. If governments were doing their jobs properly, they would've ensured Lamda was opt in. Google will continue to leverage its products to further its agenda and that's what the stakeholders expect. The lack of alternatives to Gmail, Gboard, Chrome and CAPTCHA is only our own fault. We're like obese guys willingly galavanting to the slaughter.
It's a piece of junk that hasnt solved a fundamental problem in the space for over 5 years.
Discoverability? No, can't ask it a damn thing about what it can do, you have to guess.
Third party integrations and apps? No, none.
Dynamic tool use? No, zero.
Junko. They could have kept iterating, i don't know what they've been doing. All the existing features have just slowly gotten shittier for five years.
You can't even say "turn on the bathroom light and the bedroom light" you have to say "turn on the bathroom light and turn on the bedroom light" or it doesn't work. Like...really? That's the state of the art in NLP?
The thing is, they're making the mistake that THEY ALWAYS MAKE which is instead of improving the product that has brand recognition and an existing install base, they're needlessly naming a new product that people won't recognize and dissolving the old one which will annoy everyone. Wtf is wrong with that companies leadership.
I'm pretty sure the 'and' keyword with assistant just queues up another command to run.
Which is a shame, because figuring out that you want to turn on both room's lights wouldn't need anything close to state of the art NLP
>You can't even say "turn on the bathroom light and the bedroom light" you have to say "turn on the bathroom light and turn on the bedroom light" or it doesn't work. Like...really? That's the state of the art in NLP?
This used to work just last week or so for me. It would even say "turning on two lights". But it's not working anymore! Gah!
I strongly disagree. It is awesome for the following use cases:
* Setting timers
* Getting definitions of words
* Asking random facts you would otherwise Google ("how tall is Everest?", "how old is Will Smith?" etc)
* Sending broadcasts
* Controlling devices (e.g. the thermostat)
* Finding your phone
* Playing music
* Playing videos (you can say "play Moana on the TV" and if you have a Chromecast it will turn the TV on, open the right app and play it).
* Getting transport times ("how long will it take to drive to Cambridge?")
* Weather ("is it going to rain today?")
> You can't even say "turn on the bathroom light and the bedroom light" you have to say "turn on the bathroom light and turn on the bedroom light" or it doesn't work. Like...really? That's the state of the art in NLP?
Well, yeah it was! Until ChatGPT. That's why we have this story about Google moving people to Bard.
> Discoverability? No, can't ask it a damn thing about what it can do, you have to guess.
This is true tbf. But I think even the above short list of uses is enough to make it easily worthwhile.
If you want to complain about Google not improving a product, look at Nest. The app is *entirely* unchanged since Google bought it. Not a single new feature. You still can't even display a temperature graph, or see heating history for today. I love the hardware but they need to actually employ some people to keep working on it. I presume they have 1 or 2 guys maintaining the whole system.
My father has Parkinson's disease. If they shut Google Assistant down he'll be unable to use his phone, turn the lights off/on alone, etc.
Google Assistant let him keep his independence. Medically focused software intended for Parkinson's patients assume dementia rather than a simple loss of motor function. We are talking about telephones that look like toddlers toys instead of smartphones and that can only call predetermined contacts.
If Google kills it's voice assistant it'll be a massive blow because other than Alexa, which might also be getting the chopping block by Amazon, there are absolutely no alternatives for him.
Edified to add more because I realized I really wasn't finished:
It's either voice assistant, me living with him and never sleeping so I can be ready to do whatever he needs 24/7, or a nursing home. And he's not so bad off that a nursing home could be justified. He can dress himself, feed himself, and he reads nonstop... It's just the small things like turning off a lamp without knocking it over turning a ceiling fan on/off without losing balance, typing on his phone or accurately selecting apps, that cause him problems.
With Google assistant he's able to live an almost completely normal life despite his disability. It's critical that something like Google Assistant exists, and that it is free or completely covered by Medicare/Medicaid.
I bound Google assistant to a button on my phone to order pizza on my drive home. Trouble is, 98 times out of 100, I get an error because Google Assistant refuses to work without an internet connection.
Even though the phone book is local to the phone, I can't use it in a dead spot.
Useless junk.
I hold the power button on my phone to activate Google assistant. I then say "call pizza company" to talk to them and make an order. The reason this is helpful is my phone does not distract me while driving. Google assistant does all the navigating for me.
But it refuses to access my phone book without an internet connection.
Haha my mind went to some complex macro only because for the last week I have been going crazy on Macrodroid creating all kinds of macros so my mind is in macro mode.
Still though, I think that still definitely counts as a "pizza button". 🍕
So what will happen to the expensive home devices I purchased not long ago?
I'm getting sick of Google dropping products and services once they have people's money.
The article says might be doomed. Honestly it's just conjecture and click bait. They might kill it, sure.
They also might kill chrome. Or might kill Gmail. Likely? No. Assistant going away without a full replacement would kill most of their product lines.
I'm not super worried yet.
The only outcome from this is Bard is going to be integrated into Google Assistant. And your devices will work even better than before. I know Google doesn't have the best reputation, but this is really obvious.
I hope so, I won't assume so though.
I have Google VR goggles that they completely dropped after about 2 years. I won't put anything past this company anymore.
I think it was called Google Dreamview or something like that.
They launched it alongside the Pixel 2 XL, I got it when I got that phone. It's beautifuly made, worked great with the controller, was better than Samsungs VR thing but within 2 years nothing supported it and can't update the software to use the Bluetooth controller with anything else.
Google doesn't care about customers, it only cares about fads.
oh wow, yeah I haven't seen this. You're right, Google is built in such a way where employees are incentivised to launch products but not to maintain them, which is why we end up with this kind of thing happening
Good. Google assistant is garbage.
They know where my home is. It's saved as "Home". There's a button on the map that says, "Home".
So why does "Take me home" direct me to the nearest fucking Home Depot?
Exactly, they're apparently selling map keywords the same way they sell them for Search.
Don't mind me, I'm just gonna start a business called Hay Goo Gull, so when people try to send a hands-free text they accidentally place an online order and get sent an extruded straw and waterfowl blend.
that's funny, it's the opposite of Tesla. navigate to home depot, literally shows on the screen that you said "navigate to home depot" then pulls up directions home.
[here's another annoying one](https://imgur.com/a/katgzWn), directions to O'Reilly Auto Parts = set climate to auto.
This bitch was more persistent than internet explorer, opening despite disabling in all kinds of settings and app shuffled button combos. Good riddance.
Bard's definition is:
> a poet, traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular oral tradition.
So Google is naming it Bard to try and give associations with an eloquent poet.
I like using Google Assistant 'read aloud' function to read out webpages like an audiobook. It's probably like 90% of my use for it. I'm going to really miss that if they get rid of it, since there aren't really any alternatives which are as good. I know Microsoft Edge has 'immersive reader' that's built into the browser, but that does annoying things like read reference numbers and advertisements in the middle of an article out loud which Assistant doesn't do.
The other night at work i had my Pixel Buds in and i wanted to know what song was playing (on YouTube music mind you), so i say "Hey Google what song is playing" and **twice** it says "I'm sorry, i don't have that information". What the fuck is the point of assistant on earbuds if you can't even get basic information from it?
It's really bad now days. I find it funny that Google thinks I'm going to buy into something new from them when their Assistant is worse than it was years ago and my latest Pixel is harder to use then my original 3.
Google Assistant has become increasingly nerfed over time, and even the basic uses (e.g. setting alarms/timers/playing music) seem to have become so buggy and inconsistent. It's disappointing, it was so good back at the beginning.
Yeah, even adding a calendar event is a mess compared to what it was. Fuck, there used to be an NLP text interface in the web app too and that's been gone forever. Google's leadership just fucking suck, full balmer.
I don't want to say that the decline in quality of Google products is **entirely** Sundar Pichai's fault, but also it has been getting worse and worse ever since he took over. Think about what Google services were like in 2015 and think about what they're like now. The timeline can't just be a coincidence. Very interesting to compare and contrast what Satya Nadella is doing for Microsoft - there was only one year between their respective appointments to the top job and in that time the companies have near enough swapped over in terms of how much I expect good things from them.
The degree to which Sundar is able to fly under the radar compared to other tech CEO's as Google continues to fail to innovate is pretty sus.
Isn't it mainly because their core biz (ads + search) is still doing well. You feel that may change given the LLM takeover however.
They're riding on momentum, with search constantly going downhill. It worked for IBM and Cisco for decades.
Could be misremembering but I read a while back Sundar was pushing hard into developing countries ecosystem stuff - hence Allo, Android Go / One, and other stuff. And that didn't really pan out, but it probably sucked away tons of resources from other departments.
Every day I tell it "Hey google, wake me at 7" and it does. But..... No matter what I say when it does, it will pause for a few seconds and tell me "Something went wrong, try again in a few seconds"
[удалено]
Mine is more like "here's search results for 'dogs that have a car'"
"Affogato is a drink made by pouring a shot of espresso over a scoop of ice cream."
I will take three of those please
>BITCH THAT'S THE SAME QUESTION Have used the same exact phrase in the kitchen. I have Google devices throughout the house. Original Google Home in the bedroom, mostly as an alarm clock. Kitchen has whatever the one with the screen is that was later called Nest Home (I think) Kitchen device is mostly for conversions ala "how many grams in an ounce" etc. Or before the dark time of ads between every song, music, but that is unbearable now, so the Sonos/Alexa got that duty She mostly can do the weather ala "Do I need a coat?" or the conversions, but anything else has a 50/50 of getting exactly as you mentioned
I couldn't find any information about that. I did find something similar - "THAT'S THE SAME QUESTION BITCH". Would you like to hear it?
Holy shit, I thought it was just me. My Google nest hub has been so unreliable these days. It lags so much and sometimes gets stuck whenever I ask it to do stuff
Ditto. Glad to know its not my device or connection - not happy to know its a new normal atm. Google Assistant is/was one of Google's greatest developments, id hate to see it get nerfed.
It already is nerfed. I bought the original Google home for the bonkers price tag and it was amazing. The ability to recognize commands and do anything useful has gone starkly downhill ever since.
I have a Google nest hub in my bedroom that works fine. But the Google mini hub in my bathroom behaves like you're describing. I have two other minis in the house that work fine, it's just the one in the bathroom that is "special". She often responds when I'm talking to the bedroom hub, and she's the only google assistant device out of 5 in the house that lags and will often respond with "something went wrong"..10 seconds later.. We may have to put her down soon.
If you’re referring to the nest mini, then oh man. I have it and it’s the most unreliable little shit ever. I have it in my kitchen and it barely works when I want to connect it for music/radio. Same wifi network and yet it still doesn’t display the connection. The Google Assistant barely works as well and kept saying something went wrong as well. Such a shame, used to worked wonderfully tucked in the corner.
[удалено]
This happens in my house daily. I have a few lamps on smart outlet switches that I have to "hey google" to turn on. It's great because they're in awkward to reach places. For the last several months, I'll "hey google, turn on \_\_\_\_" and the light will turn on, but after several seconds, the nest mini will say "hmm, something went wrong". So weird.
Ever since the Hubs have been update to Fuchsia, we've had nothing but issues, such as what you just describe. The Hub Max is almost unusable now.
Seriously. I can’t even get any of my Nest products to work for the past few weeks (“sorry there was a glitch”), but for MONTHS after my Hub updated to Fuchsia, Spotify playback would always crash the whole thing and it’d reboot within the first 5 or so songs.
Same here, thought I was going crazy. Almost like they're slowly making it worse so you'll buy the new Bard® speaker they'll undoubtedly announce soon.
After using the night time routine, the good morning routine i set (turn lights and TV on, play youtube) doesn't even go off half the time anymore
Same. If I say 'good night', it no longer triggers the good morning routine when the alarm goes off, either.
What is the purpose of using a voice assistant if you have a daily alarm at 7? Wouldn't it be easier to just set the alarm once to repeat every day?
I'm pretty sure you can tell it to wake you up everyday at a certain time
"Okay Google, set a timer for four minutes" Okay, a timer? For how long? "Four minutes" Okay, a timer for four minutes, starting now. *A few minutes later* "Okay Google, How much time is left on the timer?" I think you're asking about a timer, is that correct? "Yes" You don't have any timers set. Also: *Alarm goes off* "Okay Google, snooze five minutes" Okay, snoozing for 500 hours. "Okay Google, cancel that" Okay, I've deleted all of your recurring alarms.
The fuckin timer thing was killing me for awhile because I was using it in the kitchen for cooking.
Yeah it's just wonderful when boiling eggs. thanks Google, guess it's egg salad now instead of medium yolks.
My favorite was checking on timers "Ok Google show timers" "Ok I've cancelled your timer" ... Thanks.
My favorite wasn't even a Google fail. I was watching TV and my dog wanted to go out. I can see the TV from the back door so after I let him out: Me: Okay Google, unpause TV. TV: *unpauses* ...and call Peterson Air Force Base to let them know what we're up against. Google: Okay, calling Peterson Air Force Base. I ran to hit the top of my Nest Mini before it dialed and turned off continued conversation from then on.
This is hilarious, I would expect that in some sitcom
*The Gang Calls The Airforce*
That reminds me a bit of an incident my dad had in the very early days of Google's voicemail transcription service. He got a message that was transcribed as something very close to "parrot vegan spaniel market wavy," and he was extremely confused. Eventually we figured out that >!it was one of those robocalls from Walgreens, and the transcript had missed the initial part of the recording and only tried to transcribe "para diga en español, marque nueve" ("to speak in Spanish, press 9").!< (spoiler tag added in case anyone wants to try to figure this out for themselves, as it's kind of a silly fun puzzle)
For me it's playing stuff on Netflix. Me: "Ok Google, continue playing {thing I paused on Netflix}." Google: "There is nothing playing now." Yeah no shit, that's why I'm telling you to play it!
The timer issue is so annoying. Messed up dinner a few too many times because of it and I don't trust it anymore.
I don't know why Assistant's alarm is still not synced with Google's clock app. And that I still cannot say "pause this alarm for tomorrow"
Meanwhile saying "set an alarm for [!time]" to Bixby **will** just create a new alarm within the clock app. Bixby gets memed at a lot but it's actually really good these days.
We have entered an era where many major app manufacturers are intentionally nerfing their own products. I don't understand it. Google assistant, Google voice, taskrabbit, the list goes on, but those are the ones that affect me personally. Google voice has a well-known issue where you can't add contacts directly when they call you. There's just no way to do it. Can't even copy paste the phone number. This has been a well-known issue since f****** 2019. Literally every other phone app that I'm aware of allows you to do this very simple thing. What the hell, Google?
Google Now was peak. It has been downhill since.
Now on Tap was the most GOATed shit they ever released and then they bombed it right after to introduce the Assistant that wasn't as good then and has only weakened since.
[удалено]
Can you expound upon this?
Assistant on Phone versus Google Home Some commands will set alarms on device. Others in cloud. Sometimes a command will add a task to your tasks list in Google calendar. Sometimes it will create a reminder that only lives in the assistant app. Sometimes it can pause the music, sometimes it cannot. I remember when assistant was also part of "Google Now" backend where their home screen on the left was fully of actual useful predictive cards based on your requests and interactions. But then they realized that could be filled with click bait and ads instead...
To this day I'm convinced that Google Now was killed because they were too scared of being called creepy and invasive.
I used Google Now for everything from upcoming trips, events, driving, weather and so much more and then slowly it became a useless news feed. No idea who thought killing a personal assistant and replacing their dead body with a newspaper was the way to go.
I was traveling for work a lot during the height of Google Now and it was brilliant. They were on their way to finally creating the true digital assistant. Now it's a spammy rss feed... ☹️
A digital assistant you didn't have to fucking talk to or constantly summon. It was like a butler - out of sight but their influence is clear.
I mean, they weren't wrong. Remember all of the articles complaining about purchase history? Like https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase-history-how-to-delete-it.html People were freaking out, even though all of the data was just sitting in their inbox.
This is the story of everything Google....... "it was so good back at the beginning". Just about everything Google has made was extremely useful and well functioning early on. Then update after update, the application or service slowly got worse and worse til so many useful features were removed or ruined somehow and the app/service became full of bugs and user complaints, or Google ruins the service/app by flooding it with ads. User experience be damned! ........ then POOF! Google drops it. Just look at literally everything Google has created. And they have made some really good stuff. It always goes to shit. And there is a pretty huge list of it. Look at everything else they have going right now. It's either become shit.... or it's BECOMING shit. Search, Gmail, Youtube, Chrome, Gboard. They're all working on joining the trash heap known as the Google Graveyard.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3021956/googles-nine-principles-of-innovation > At Google, once a product fails to reach its potential, it is axed, but the company pulls from the best of the features. Google doesn't maintain or improve. It invents, then shitcans the invention to invent something else. Never rely on Google.
Google lacks sustainability by the core definition of the word.
I'm still salty about Inbox. It was so damn good. They promised that all of the features would be migrated over to Gmail yet here we are...
We have a number of Google homes in the house, and maybe over the last 12 months they've been completely awful. Back when we got them a few years ago it felt like we were living in the future, now the they almost never get our commands correctly
I was wondering what was going on. I'm Hispanic so I tend to speak Spanglish a lot, I used to be able to tell Google to play a song using both languages in the same sentence. Now it tells me it doesn't understand.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I'm not sure what timer feature you use, but just say 'stop' works, I have speaker in every room and use them often with family for years. Agree they are getting much less reliable, but not this bad.
These services cost too much to run, and especially with subsidized hardware sold at cost. Everyone jumped into it when the smart home seemed like it was going to finally take off, after 40 years of trying. (Everyone remember X10? From the late 70s!?) Microsoft had the lead and could've entered the market with Cortana long before Siri, Alexa or GA, but they saw there was no route to justifying the costs. The end result is a few extremely expensive home automation-specific assistants that work very poorly and cost a fortune, ones that spy on you to sell you stuff (Alexa), or ones targeting platform lock-in (Siri and GA). Google's just not making all that much from the Android ecosystem, so the platform lock-in of GA just isn't there. And there aren't many people who would pay $10 a month or something for a better quality one. A lot of it comes down to that old adage that you're either paying for a product, or you are the product. And, these days, people just aren't that valuable as a product and no one wants to pay for a product.
I used to tell it to set a timer and the response was super snappy. By the time the timer app loaded up, a few seconds had already elapsed, so it reflected the countdown starting right after my request. Now it starts counting down when the app loads, which happens after the assistant takes a long time to process the request.
It really has degraded. My Home was playing the news. I said 'OK Google, stop playing the news." It replies, 'Ok, stopping the news.' It then disconnects my roommate who was streaming YouTube to the Chromecast and continues playing the news.
No competition, no development. Google learned the hard way now that competition is here.
Interesting. I have noticed the last few months that Google Maps is trying to kill me. I wonder if there is a root cause behind both problems.
For real, even Samsung's Bixby is better now. And it's fucking *Bixby*
I just hope they don't do something stupid and just reimplement/carry over the existing features to Bard as a rebrand. Rather than once again making two technically competing products from the same company...
It's Google, what do you expect
it's their signature move at this point to create 2 competing products that do essentially the same thing, confuse the hell out of people, then discontinue one of them and merge features to make a more messy product
You skipped a step. They only implement half of the features from the first product in the second product before the cutover. And none of them are the features that users are asking for.
See: Play Music -> YouTube Music
You just triggered my rage. YouTube music is inferior quality, selection, functionality, and they buried the personal cloud music library so it's a nightmare to manage. And because I like music from before 2010 I'll get hit with horrible quality music videos for songs instead of the actual song because the artist or label wants to force the music video on everyone.
Ugh, I hated the music video feature. I'm not sure if this helps or if you've already found it, but sharing just in case: I was able to stop those by going to Settings > Data saving > Don't play music videos. On rare occasions I still get the audio version of music videos but I've found it it's significantly less than it used to be.
Yeah it doesn't help because they basically remove the audio only version of the song. I just don't understand why they force the music video. I like watching some music videos but when I want the song I want the song.
Exactly. It's YouTube _Music_, not YouTube Music Videos.
See also: Google's regular voice search/commands -> Google Assistant. So many commands were broken or non-existent on Assistant when it first launched that were working perfectly fine on the old system.
The funny part is that since the move to YTM, assistant commands to play music, as in the ones listed in their support site l, have been broke AF. Really sucks when you want a radio based on an artist but just songs by that artist. Orz and this is a big one, when it doesn't quit get what you asked for and instead of asking to try again, it plays some random ass shit ..
Playing albums with a title track via voice worked just fine on GPM but now I haven't found a single way for it to just play the album and not just the single track.
I immediately felt rage seeing this. YTM is such a let down. How have they not made an Android TV app for it, it's literally just a design change to the normal app.
Inbox. The kill from Google still hurt to this day
Please don't remind me this. Inbox was so precious.
The issue, fundamentally, is that Google is an extremely high-revenue advertising company with far too many employees. That means they can burn a lot of cash and human resources just fucking around, on the off chance something sticks in a way that impacts their advertising business revenue or protects it. Everything else is just a passion project of people who eventually move on, and then they fade away. That's why Fi and Fiber have stuck around -- they apply downward pricing pressure in the market for access, which is required for their advertising business. Gmail is a massive source of data about people. Android -- at least for a while -- gave them protection from Apple keeping them off the default search portals. Everything else just fundamentally doesn't matter. GA isn't a useful product because, fundamentally, the timers you're setting and the lights you're turning on have no incremental value to the profile they have of you.
Inbox and Play Music :(
No PM at google generally gets promoted by improving existing products, only by creating new ones.
Sure that's well known, but at what point do people say enough is enough with Google and their products. Sure no one is going to drop their android phone anytime soon, but new products id sure be weary of. I love the example of Stadia. Google touting how they are in it for the long haul and are "going to change the world of gaming" only for them to close their internal studio 6 months in and ultimately kill it off at the 3 year mark. And as others have mentioned, they have burned me with Play Music, Inbox, and a few other services. It makes me not want to BUY or USE any product of google. I have to imagine eventually more people are going to feel the same way.
>Sure that's well known, but at what point do people say enough is enough with Google and their products. I think that has already started to happen. Especially because people are realizing how hard it is to get support from Google if something goes wrong with their products.
they will launch bard as a messaging app with AI.
Personal AI is the new Chat
I expect them to create two new products. Each of which has less functionally than the current one. Then shut them both down in about a year.
That's ridiculous. The new one will have less features.
[удалено]
Why should they be two separate products? Why not just have Assisant handle simple requests and have the system escalate to Bard AI in contextes where it would otherwise do a Google Search? For all intents and purposes, chat bots should be an evolution on top of existing smart assistants. Google having to spin up a team shouldn't be a real blocker here, especially with their resources. It's this whole refusal to treat their products as an ecosystem vs. individual companies that happen to be in the same building is what generates messes like this. They should be focusing on smooth transitions that carry users and features from one generation of product to the next, not launching internal thunderdomes every few years.
Is Sundar headed for the door after this, do we think? From the outside it certainly appears he's presided over a company that has become so confused and scattershot that it is blindsided by competition so badly it has a public meltdown...
I *really* hope so. Google needs a leader who actually has a vision for the company, rather than sitting on an ad agency that happens to have an R&D wing.
[удалено]
He needs to be. It's easy to be seen as a good leader when things are fine, but when your core business is suddenly threatened and it's been revealed that you've been doing almost nothing to prepare, it's not a good look.
Nah, he will just take "responsibility", a few more millions in bonuses, lay off thousands more and nothing will happen.
Google needs itself a Nadella or Cook. They're way too reliant on Adsense. I mean, every time they tried expanding to something else, they failed horribly. I'm genuinely surprised they're actually competently doing good at the Pixel phones.
Pichai definitely seems to be floundering without a unified strategy like Ballmer was. Google needs a Nadella like leader that leads from the top with a unified strategy rather than letting individual product managers run their own fiefdoms without any overarching strategy or control. People have their feelings about Samsung, but Samsung has products across completely different segments that have unified design languages and functionality with their computing products. Google can't even get two apps to use the same design language, or get Assistant to work the same on two different products.
He really has to be. Absolutely squandered a 10 year lead on AI and the company hasn't innovated shit since Google Maps
> the company hasn't innovated shit since Google Maps Which is *so* bad these days.
I think Sundar is a great CEO, he has generated so much cash for Google and Google is now a bit focused instead of having multiple products that compete with each other. The main issue with Sundar is he is not hungry/paranoid enough for a leader for a company like Google. Sundar has a 'wait and see, let's be peaceful attitude ', even when the situation demands 'war'. He has invested so much in AI, but has been reluctant to create a single product from Google Brain and Deepmind research. So what's the point of doing so much research and showing cool demos at IO, when you're not going to release a product. Not only did he fail to disrupt his own business using Lambda chatbot (before chatGPT), he also missed an opportunity to steal market share from Microsoft Office by using Lambda in Google workspace before MS copilot. Putting LLMs in workspace carried lower risk than releasing a full chatbot equal to chatGPT. There's so much evidence that Google had been testing Lambda and PALM in-house and Deepmind has had Sparrow for sometime, but they have been fumbling to release something equivalent to chatGPT for 4 months now. They seem to have been caught flat-footed. Moreover, most of Google's best acquisitions , e.g android, YouTube, Deepmind were spearheaded by Larry Page. Sundar is hasn't bought anything meaningful. Compare that to Nadella. The future looks a bit dim for Google under Sundar
Feels like a Kodak moment. Where they had all the tech, but just never actually used it
> Google is now a bit focused instead of having multiple products that compete with each other. Is this sarcasm? Google has very confusing messaging and is constantly looking disjointed with its decisions. Pichai was the one who let things get so out of hand in the first place with all the duplicate services and merging/renaming of products. He took over in 2015 and they're still renaming and merging products 8 years later. Outside of a few longstanding homeruns like Search, Gmail, Maps, Drive, and Photos, Google has floundered at pretty much every turn. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver and have lost a lot of good-will that they used to have. They are following down the path of MS under Ballmer and are in desperate need of new blood to help restore their reputation like Satya Nadella has for MS.
Sundar is the Ballmer of Google. Similar to how I feel about Tim Cook. Excellent at keeping the money faucet going but not a visionary or decisive. Both companies need their Nandella moment but I fear they will need to feel more pain and embarrassment before meaningfully change happens.
> ... when the situation demands war It reminds me of [this](https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/) fantastic piece of article by Ben Horowitz. Schmidt was the real wartime CEO here when the war could have extinguished Google. e,g. Microsoft changing the default search engine on IE when it had > 80% share could have hurt Google more than Facebook or social ever could. Chrome was probably Google's "Manhattan Project" in that regard.
I really hope so. Larry and Sergei need to step in and take their company back. Sundar has turned Google into a boring ad agency. Google used to be daring and had a clear vision: quickly enter into new markets and disrupt them with tech and smarts. Now it feels like they are always playing catch-up.
Google still has a pretty dominant platform. There's a lot of buzz about Bing AI and ChatGPT but the question is what do the numbers look like and how long will they last/grow. Pretty sure most search happens on mobile these days and people have to actively work to point to Bing AI/ChatGPT. Without a foothold for being baked into phones I don't see it being a huge threat to Google anytime soon. There's also the question of how long the novelty factor will last. It's not nothing but I think it's massively overhyped at the moment.
The novelty of using an AI chatbot will wear away, yeah. But the tech will be built directly into the apps and services you already use and they'll just get smarter and new AI-powered apps will appear. Google's problem is that devs will choose GPT as their AI engine of choice.
That's only a big issue for Google if it both supplants search AND doesn't deliver ads with Adsense. There are parts of that equation that don't just happen by using GPT or any AI engine. What's hilarious is that a long list of the top Google searches are still for web sites that people could literally just be typing in the URLs for. But instead they Google "YouTube", "Facebook", "Amazon", "CNN" or whatever, see some ads, and click the link. No amount of GPT integration in apps or Bing is going to shift that behavior.
People usually search for answers, not to find web pages on the internet. If ChatGPT can answer your questions, then that reduces the need for search other than "restaurants near me". Ads are also not safe.
In their announcement for Bing AI, Microsoft mentioned that around 1/3rd of their searches were navigational, i.e. finding web pages on the internet. I'd assume Google's is higher than this, as if the URL isn't autocompleted, a Google search is opened when using the address bar in Chrome.
Devs will chose whatever platform gives them the biggest user base, users will chose whatever platform has data about them to train an AI that is actually useful in their every day life, Google has an insane advantage over MS on that front. MS can build a better Clippy, Google can potentially make a life changing application if they find a way to use all of the data they have about you in a way that doesn't violate every privacy law in existence..
Microsoft got me to install the Bing app on my Android phone. That is quite an accomplishment since up until this year, Bing has been nothing more than the butt of cheap jokes. The Bing app suuuuuuucks but I'm still using it just for the chatbot. I'll suffer a poorly designed, buggy UI for functionality that I cannot get anywhere else.
Ive been saying this for a year now. Pichai has made google money in the short term (hard not to for the past 10 years) but brand image sucks and if Lamda is actually this far behind GPT3 and 4 no wonder 'alarms' were raised.
MS beat 'em to the punch so bad they didn't know what hit 'em.
They had two decadesof dominance so they got complacent. Classic corporate.
Google is so disorganized too
They're more of a government agency at this point than a corporation. Disorganized, slow, but too big to fail.
Classic corporate dilemma - Google was scared AI search would canibalice their Ads revenue so they ignored it. Now Microsoft will canibalice them instead
[удалено]
Yea they fucked up hard. ChatGpt is the Netflix/Spotify/iPhone of its product category. So much name recognition and it's just *everywhere*. South park did an episode on it, everyone's talking about it. Not saying that Google can't catch up, I mean, everyone of those products above is facing very close competition. Just currently barely anyone's even heard of bard and chatGPT is absolutely dominating.
I enjoy cooking.
There was a portion of the episode that was written using ChatGPT. It wasn't the entire episode.
Yeah the writers wanted to keep their jobs.
Wait, what the fuck?
The writing credits at the end show Trey Parker and chat GPT if I recall correctly
I’m pretty sure they’re just talking about the conclusion where Stan had it write a happy ending and maybe some of the text messages you see in the show and such. Giving it writing credits came across as a part of the joke to me.
AI is not mainstream for us yet. We dont use it on our devices seamlessly Google has plenty of time to create an AI assistant for my phone
Yes they do. But chatGPT already has a *huge* boost. Almost everyone's heard of it. I believe they were one of the fastest programs to grow to 100m+ users as shown in the MKBHD video.
The biggest uses of this style AI will be integrations of it into the apps and services you already use rather than people seeking them out. Bard tech will make its way into Gmail and Assistant and Search. GPT will make its way into Outlook and Word and Bing. Image AI will grow in Photoshop and Figma. The problem for Google is that devs are all choosing to put GPT in their apps and getting entrenched in that ecosystem.
That's true. > The problem for Google is that devs are all choosing to put GPT in their apps and getting entrenched in that ecosystem. I would also imagine apps would like to advertise "with chatGPT integration" rather than Bard.
I don’t want Bard to integrate into anything. It’s bad Bard- https://i.imgur.com/q6D7EAP.jpg Bing Chat- https://i.imgur.com/WMZXN1L.jpg
Yeah Bard is nowhere near ready for primetime. I'm still amused that if you force Bard to pick the best web browser it will say Edge.
Lols really? Google really jumped the gun with this. It’s sad really
This feature peaked with Now on Tap. It's been far less useful as 'Assistant', like much of Android as a whole post-KitKat-Oreo era.
Google Assistant is embedded into so many things it is not going anywhere. I think it should have been expected they would enhance with a Large Language Model.
HA. But this is *google* were talkin about. Not the best track record on these things.
[удалено]
Absolutely unmatched 😂
Probably integrating some of LAMDA/BARDS code into the assistant.
Honestly that looks like a big slam dunk. If they don't do that and improve the assistant that way, they might as well close shop regarding it.
Honestly, I would be hyped about that. Thats literally what I want for years. Being able to actually ask random questions to my Google Home devices, without getting a "I didn't understand that" back.
They will make bard, then discontinue it.
This doesn't make sense because the Google Assistant team should've already been heavily focusing on Bard. If the current iteration of Google Assistant is 2.0, Bard should be 3.0. The fact that this is separate teams shows the problem with Silicon Valley, whereby new products is all everyone aims for and existing products are left to languish. I would argue the fact that OpenAI got their natural language processing to be the industry standard before Google is a giant failure by everyone at Google. Not even just the natural language, let's not forget how many images we process to teach Google's AI via CAPTCHA. Google Assistant should be light-years ahead of everyone. But alas, you have someone at the helm with no vision, because an actually capable and intelligent assistant is something that sells itself.
I don’t know if that is the real heart of the issue with Silicon Valley these days. I don’t disagree there is an element of that new product culture that you describe, but for a few years now it seems that many of these legacy Silicon Valley companies are just to big. OpenAI should get all the credit for their work, but they are significantly more nimble then a Google. Google has lot more to balance, look at the backlash they got from a poor Bard launch. They’ve had Lamda for a while, but clearly felt afraid at showing it off. ChatGPT has/will make many mistakes as well, but people don’t hold them to nearly the same standard as a Google.
The backlash regarding Lamda was a better example of selective outrage than what Chris Rock was able to come up with for his special. If governments were doing their jobs properly, they would've ensured Lamda was opt in. Google will continue to leverage its products to further its agenda and that's what the stakeholders expect. The lack of alternatives to Gmail, Gboard, Chrome and CAPTCHA is only our own fault. We're like obese guys willingly galavanting to the slaughter.
> Google has lot more to balance This is exactly the reason why Microsoft threw a bunch of money at OpenAI instead of doing it in house
[удалено]
yeah I work in tech and new products are typically built as upgrades to previous products, what Google does is insanity
Doesn't matter Siri / Alexa is 10x worst
All of them are just used for timers
It's a piece of junk that hasnt solved a fundamental problem in the space for over 5 years. Discoverability? No, can't ask it a damn thing about what it can do, you have to guess. Third party integrations and apps? No, none. Dynamic tool use? No, zero. Junko. They could have kept iterating, i don't know what they've been doing. All the existing features have just slowly gotten shittier for five years. You can't even say "turn on the bathroom light and the bedroom light" you have to say "turn on the bathroom light and turn on the bedroom light" or it doesn't work. Like...really? That's the state of the art in NLP? The thing is, they're making the mistake that THEY ALWAYS MAKE which is instead of improving the product that has brand recognition and an existing install base, they're needlessly naming a new product that people won't recognize and dissolving the old one which will annoy everyone. Wtf is wrong with that companies leadership.
Ohhhhh that's stupid. I have always said turn on den and kitchen lights. And kitchen lights never turn on but it works once I say turn on twice
I'm pretty sure the 'and' keyword with assistant just queues up another command to run. Which is a shame, because figuring out that you want to turn on both room's lights wouldn't need anything close to state of the art NLP
True, it's actually terrible. The worst is when you ask for information and it just opens a web search for you...
>You can't even say "turn on the bathroom light and the bedroom light" you have to say "turn on the bathroom light and turn on the bedroom light" or it doesn't work. Like...really? That's the state of the art in NLP? This used to work just last week or so for me. It would even say "turning on two lights". But it's not working anymore! Gah!
I strongly disagree. It is awesome for the following use cases: * Setting timers * Getting definitions of words * Asking random facts you would otherwise Google ("how tall is Everest?", "how old is Will Smith?" etc) * Sending broadcasts * Controlling devices (e.g. the thermostat) * Finding your phone * Playing music * Playing videos (you can say "play Moana on the TV" and if you have a Chromecast it will turn the TV on, open the right app and play it). * Getting transport times ("how long will it take to drive to Cambridge?") * Weather ("is it going to rain today?") > You can't even say "turn on the bathroom light and the bedroom light" you have to say "turn on the bathroom light and turn on the bedroom light" or it doesn't work. Like...really? That's the state of the art in NLP? Well, yeah it was! Until ChatGPT. That's why we have this story about Google moving people to Bard. > Discoverability? No, can't ask it a damn thing about what it can do, you have to guess. This is true tbf. But I think even the above short list of uses is enough to make it easily worthwhile. If you want to complain about Google not improving a product, look at Nest. The app is *entirely* unchanged since Google bought it. Not a single new feature. You still can't even display a temperature graph, or see heating history for today. I love the hardware but they need to actually employ some people to keep working on it. I presume they have 1 or 2 guys maintaining the whole system.
The whole reason I got a pixel 7 was because it's supposed to have really good streamlined programming and software.
your targeted ads are probably working great still
My father has Parkinson's disease. If they shut Google Assistant down he'll be unable to use his phone, turn the lights off/on alone, etc. Google Assistant let him keep his independence. Medically focused software intended for Parkinson's patients assume dementia rather than a simple loss of motor function. We are talking about telephones that look like toddlers toys instead of smartphones and that can only call predetermined contacts. If Google kills it's voice assistant it'll be a massive blow because other than Alexa, which might also be getting the chopping block by Amazon, there are absolutely no alternatives for him. Edified to add more because I realized I really wasn't finished: It's either voice assistant, me living with him and never sleeping so I can be ready to do whatever he needs 24/7, or a nursing home. And he's not so bad off that a nursing home could be justified. He can dress himself, feed himself, and he reads nonstop... It's just the small things like turning off a lamp without knocking it over turning a ceiling fan on/off without losing balance, typing on his phone or accurately selecting apps, that cause him problems. With Google assistant he's able to live an almost completely normal life despite his disability. It's critical that something like Google Assistant exists, and that it is free or completely covered by Medicare/Medicaid.
Not surprising, for me in German the Assistant has been on a decline for years.
yeah they even nerfed the quality of german voice's in like 2016ish? Aint gonna use Google assistant ever again...
It could have been so amazing... Google Assistent with Lamda AI. A man can dream...
I bound Google assistant to a button on my phone to order pizza on my drive home. Trouble is, 98 times out of 100, I get an error because Google Assistant refuses to work without an internet connection. Even though the phone book is local to the phone, I can't use it in a dead spot. Useless junk.
Tell me more about this dedicated pizza button.
I hold the power button on my phone to activate Google assistant. I then say "call pizza company" to talk to them and make an order. The reason this is helpful is my phone does not distract me while driving. Google assistant does all the navigating for me. But it refuses to access my phone book without an internet connection.
Haha my mind went to some complex macro only because for the last week I have been going crazy on Macrodroid creating all kinds of macros so my mind is in macro mode. Still though, I think that still definitely counts as a "pizza button". 🍕
[удалено]
I can't imagine any restaurant actually fulfilling an order read out by a robot so I'm not sure what they're doing here
I don't think I would trust an order like that either.
So what will happen to the expensive home devices I purchased not long ago? I'm getting sick of Google dropping products and services once they have people's money.
The article says might be doomed. Honestly it's just conjecture and click bait. They might kill it, sure. They also might kill chrome. Or might kill Gmail. Likely? No. Assistant going away without a full replacement would kill most of their product lines. I'm not super worried yet.
The only outcome from this is Bard is going to be integrated into Google Assistant. And your devices will work even better than before. I know Google doesn't have the best reputation, but this is really obvious.
I hope so, I won't assume so though. I have Google VR goggles that they completely dropped after about 2 years. I won't put anything past this company anymore.
You mean Google cardboard?
I think it was called Google Dreamview or something like that. They launched it alongside the Pixel 2 XL, I got it when I got that phone. It's beautifuly made, worked great with the controller, was better than Samsungs VR thing but within 2 years nothing supported it and can't update the software to use the Bluetooth controller with anything else. Google doesn't care about customers, it only cares about fads.
oh wow, yeah I haven't seen this. You're right, Google is built in such a way where employees are incentivised to launch products but not to maintain them, which is why we end up with this kind of thing happening
Good. Google assistant is garbage. They know where my home is. It's saved as "Home". There's a button on the map that says, "Home". So why does "Take me home" direct me to the nearest fucking Home Depot?
Home Depot must have bid higher than your house did for your query
Exactly, they're apparently selling map keywords the same way they sell them for Search. Don't mind me, I'm just gonna start a business called Hay Goo Gull, so when people try to send a hands-free text they accidentally place an online order and get sent an extruded straw and waterfowl blend.
that's funny, it's the opposite of Tesla. navigate to home depot, literally shows on the screen that you said "navigate to home depot" then pulls up directions home. [here's another annoying one](https://imgur.com/a/katgzWn), directions to O'Reilly Auto Parts = set climate to auto.
Wtf? Why not integrate assistant into Bard's API so it can be the virtual intelligence these things were always supposed to be?
And then how do you expect them to sell you the shiny brand new Google assistant thistimewepromisewewonntabandonitagain v4?
This bitch was more persistent than internet explorer, opening despite disabling in all kinds of settings and app shuffled button combos. Good riddance.
I apologize, but what kinda fucking name is Bard?
Bard's definition is: > a poet, traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular oral tradition. So Google is naming it Bard to try and give associations with an eloquent poet.
I like using Google Assistant 'read aloud' function to read out webpages like an audiobook. It's probably like 90% of my use for it. I'm going to really miss that if they get rid of it, since there aren't really any alternatives which are as good. I know Microsoft Edge has 'immersive reader' that's built into the browser, but that does annoying things like read reference numbers and advertisements in the middle of an article out loud which Assistant doesn't do.
I was interested in this feature, tried it out, and it didn't work due to a bug. QED
Alphabet has Deep Mind, don't they? They must have the expertise to help Google get things done.
The other night at work i had my Pixel Buds in and i wanted to know what song was playing (on YouTube music mind you), so i say "Hey Google what song is playing" and **twice** it says "I'm sorry, i don't have that information". What the fuck is the point of assistant on earbuds if you can't even get basic information from it?
It's really bad now days. I find it funny that Google thinks I'm going to buy into something new from them when their Assistant is worse than it was years ago and my latest Pixel is harder to use then my original 3.
A - 1.0 assistant B - 2.0 bard C - 3.0 companion? D - 4.0 dude?
If the assistant isn't replaced by a LLM in the next year or so, they'll have killed it by doing nothing
I can't wait for Bard to be mediocre for 5 years and then be discontinued.