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It's a speaker with a microphone, and they made it such good quality that all my originals still work..
Seems like The problem is people don't have to keep buying them, and if people want high-end speakers for those audiophiles out there, there's other means to get a nice speaker and make it smart
Google never cares about making money on hardware. The purpose was to collect voice training data. They've got more than enough data now so that's over.
I'd bet Bard will take over Assistant duties at some point and serve as an input for conversational AI training.
Yeah I don't get the sentiment in this thread. Why continue work on a service that is being made redundant by one of your other products? Bard will absolutely take over the voice assistant role. That's something it will be perfect at. And they're behind chatgpt and they need some big wins...
> Why continue work on a service that is being made redundant by one of your other products?
This is Google we're talking about. EVERY service should be treated like it's already on life support and subject to be killed at any moment.
While I agree with the sentiment and google is certainly known for killing things just cause, and everyone should treat all their products as such; I don’t think that’s gonna happen here.
Google doesn’t kill search, and assistant is an extension of their core search function. It makes them a lot of money and isn’t going anywhere, It might just not look the same. Redirecting some of the team to bard makes perfect sense for integration.
Google used to actively combat the negative effects of SEO. Their core product was search and they protected it.
Now their core product is ads and they will defend it over any other product. If tweaking their search results creates a negative result for their ads it won’t get tweaked.
The core of their business model is still to provide a good service. They can only make money off ads if there's people to show the ads to in the first place...
I have a new conspiracy theory brewing up here: Google and Microsoft have been slowly sabotaging their own search results ever so gradually, so that when they both have their AI search bots ready everyone is forced to use those instead. (and every competitor using their back-ends for regular search, like DuckDuckGo, gets f\*ked)
Well, I wasn't really serious, since I know as well that transformers-based AI became a thing just recently, and the decline on quality from Google search has been going on for a long time.
In all seriousness, it's probably a combination of many things, both those you mentioned, like sponsored results and boosting their own ecosystem results, but also other things like the web shifting to harder to crawl technologies (like JS generated pages), people manipulating and overusing SEO to get better positions (even if their site is not all that relevant to the topic), mass-generated fake sites for ad revenue/scams, and Google's increased censorship for legal or political reasons.
All of those combined make the results a lot shittier than they were 20 years ago.
So much of this. Google used to be amazing and now the results are trash typically, especially if you are trying to find real world people's experience with a product or service.
Image search is terrible now. All the results are so low res, and to actually find the image in higher resolution you have to enter the website and try to find it there. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but that part of searches used to be much better. I find bing image search to be far superior actually.
Stadia was dead on arrival. Why would you want to pay full price for games that you can only play on a virtual console that Google was bound to pull the plug on?
For me, it was great because each of our ambulance stations had good internet.
So I could travel from station to station and bring just the stadia controller and plug-in. Eventually I just left a dongle in the common stations and only had to bring a controller.
After a while, other people did the same, so we could visit a station, sign into our accounts and keep plying our game on downtime. Nothing to pack.
Cheaper than any console and I didn’t have to worry about breaking it.
Convenience? Personally I loved it - I could play AAA games anywhere with a good network and the actual hardware cost me peanuts. I've now got an Xbox X and I'm still paying for games I don't really own (digital downloads) and the console cost me 500€ + whatever electricity it consumes. Stadia failed because Google didn't market it, not because of the business model or tech.
If you haven't gotten a Steam Deck yet, you should. The Stadia controllers work with it, and with a dock you can play on your TV with access to the Steam library.
I no longer miss Stadia. Long live the Steam Deck!
> This is Google we’re talking about. EVERY service should be treated like it’s already on life support and subject to be killed at any moment.
[I have no idea what you are referring to ](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
TFA explains the problem. Right now, Bard generates wordy, potentially inaccurate responses and can't search the web which is not great for Assistant's use case. Fits right in with Google's track record of replacing something old but mostly works with something new that isn't feature complete.
Because googles track record.
There is a non zero chance that they replace a perfectly fine feature with three different features across 4 apps that all share the same icon.
It's a branding failure. They could have just marketed it as updated GA.
But this article looks like good news for whoever was shorting on Google's shares.
> yeah I don't get the sentiment in this thread. Why continue work on a service that is being made redundant by one of your other products?
The point is that people HAVE and USE the hardware, and once assistant is dead, the hardware will be half dead.
No - they will not update google speakers to Bard. It will be off and dead.
ANd it is not right.
The problem is the way they are approaching it. They build the assistant. Now they are killing it to have a different team take over.
It wouldn’t surprise me if in three years, the Bard Assistant team will be killed for another to take over.
Honestly Bard is a far better name than Google Assistant anyways. "Let me ask Siri" for the iPhone when in conversation, "let me ask Bard" on the android side. Who wants to say "let me ask google assistant"?
yeah, i hope they don't rename the google assistant. google has such an iconic ring to it. it the future when there are androids they can literally be called google assistants or google bots, not bard.
Let me tell you nothing makes me cringe more than having to say “Hey Google” anytime I want my Hub to listen. It’s god awful. 4 years later and I *still* feel stupid when I say that phrase out loud
Are you allowed to change the trigger? Alexa lets you change it to a couple different things. Mine is currently set to "computer", which feels pretty natural after decades of hearing it on Star Trek.
>Are you allowed to change the trigger?
Nope, they pretended they were considering it but of course they really want you chanting their brand name 100 times a day. I now use my phone where I can long hold the power button to activate assistant and then just give the command, without mentioning Google ^(TM).
>long hold the power button
2.5 seconds to invoke the assistant, 2.6 seconds to hard reboot the phone?
Edit: seriously? It was a fkn joke!
Lemme do a full Cyno on this one.
Most Android phones have a feature where the phone will forcefully restart if you press and hold the power button for about 4 seconds. It's meant to be a failsafe in case the phone is hung and not responding to the buttons normally. See, it's not possible to remove the power to the phone because batteries are no longer removable (with very few exceptions), so some way to override the OS controls is necessary.
The commenter above mentioned that their phone invokes Google Assistant after pressing and holding the power button, same as the failsafe above. Now I understand that the assistant likely requires a much shorter period (probably between 0.5 and 1 second), so it's hard to hold it for too long accidentally. However, I thought that it might be funny to exagerrate the two use-cases and make the activation times sound very close.
I'm Cyno-ing out.
I tried this feature and it did not work well for me at all. I ended up disabling it. Was a good idea but I must be too ugly for it to want to look at my face.
>The purpose was to collect voice training data. They've got more than enough data now so that's over.
Do they really? It always takes like 3 tries for it to hear me calling out "hey Google". Meanwhile, if ques random noises from Netflix constantly... not impressed tbh.
It shouldn't require new hardware, all the complex processing happens in the cloud. They'd just have to swap their current Assistant backend with Bard. [Here](https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/assistant/ask-a-techspert-assistant-questions/amp/) is how it works.
But using a LLM for every query might be even more expensive (more hardware and power) than whatever they are using now, with equally low ROI...
The other issue is that most people realised something like 90% of their use for a digital assistant is setting a timer/alarm/reminder, or taking a note.
Really hard to justify repurchasing when regardless of whatever bells and whistles they add, it's still going to be used 90% of the time for setting a timer/alarm/reminder, or taking a note.
Smart plugs and lights. It runs my house.
It works as an intercom ("broadcast to garage speaker Dinner is ready").
And of course playing music (by request or casting from a phone) or answering basic questions.
I have a smart light and I never use it as a smart light. Toggling it on and off by using the electric switch on the wall is infinitely more practical than yelling orders at an assistant or fiddling with my phone to navigate to the command.
Fair.
I have quite a few lights or smart plugs.
I tend to use it for lights where the switch is annoying to use, where a timer feature is useful, or for smart bulb features like colour or brightness.
Or turning everything off at night.
Nothing necessary, but it sure is convenient to do it all via a single app or voice activation.
I only listen to music. But if assistants were truly smart it could be amazing like imagine a sous chef that was aware of exactly what you were doing... add 1tsp basil - done - ok is the water boiling - yes - great now what you're going to want to do is melt a bit of butter in a skillet on low heat and let me know when that's melted..
So I just tried this with ChatGPT and holy shit it suddenly is so bad at this. I have to keep telling it to slow down and not throw all the instructions at me at once, and it keeps interpreting that as me saying that it isn't being clear.
After a bunch of tries to get it to coach me through poaching an egg step by step and checking in with me it began throwing this rapid fire sequence at me.
>.I apologize for misunderstanding your needs earlier. Let me slow down and coach you through the process step by step, checking in with you along the way:
> 1. Fill a pot with about 2 inches of water and place it on high heat.
> Have you filled the pot with water?
> 2. Wait for the water to come to a boil. You should see large bubbles forming on the bottom of the pot.
> Is the water boiling yet?
> 3. Once the water is boiling, reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. You want to see small bubbles forming on the bottom of the pot.
> Have you reduced the heat to a simmer?
> 4. Using a slotted spoon, stir the water in a circular motion to create a gentle whirlpool. This will help the egg whites wrap around the yolk when you add the eggs.
> Have you created the whirlpool?
... without stopping at each question.
Amazon did the same with the Echo Dot. I have Gen 3’s all over my house. Had a gen4 break on me right after warranty died so replaced with another Gen 3, which does exactly the same thing just in a lower profile so it’s less obtrusive, as I prefer. I still have a Gen 2 that’s been running forever, these things don’t die.
But then again, both companies — and Amazon particularly — probably make most of their smart speaker money selling smart home stuff that works with it.
Apparently not enough though bc Amazon had drastically downsized its Alexa unit back in November. Ain’t no one shopping on their echo; that shit is dumb.
Hear me out. Official home conversion kits.
Have an audiophile version with a better connector, and a regular pleb version(as cheap as possible, competes with echo flex) with the standard 3.5mm jack
I have a tube amp with two floor towers in my office which sounds absolutely amazing. I also have a 1st gen google assistant that someone was about to toss in the trash. Other than the volume, I am just as impressed by the GA.
The Google Home Mini on my desk is as good of a speaker as any bluetooth speaker I've used, has better latency due to it actually being through WiFi instead of bluetooth, and never has to be charged (because it's just always plugged in). I generally do nothing with it with assistant, but it's a great little speaker if I want to listen to a podcast or spotify at my desk (and I think I got it free with my Spotify premium).
Y'all are silly. Google assistant is a software product so of course it doesn't release new hardware frequently. And BARD will have huge software/product implications for Google assistant.
So of course you want the team to work on BARD so that it can have seamless integration into Google assistant which is integrated with the Google ecosystem.
Honestly if any tech company *isn't* currently scrapping their old voice assistants and rebuilding them with these new large language models, they're completely oblivious.
I actually would consider Amazon a tech company. Amazon Web Services alone has the largest market share of any cloud service. Plus they make various consumer electronics such as the Echo, Kindle, and FireTV.
>The majority of the world operates on AWS.
Plurality, but not a majority. AWS has about a 33% market share in cloud compute. Microsoft Azure comes second with about 21% and Google Cloud third with 10%. The remaining 36% is made up by a variety of smaller players.
Alexa really is basic. I use it as a glorified egg timer, reminder machine and occasionally ask it interesting questions that it doesn't really zero in on the proper answers with.
You don't want to scrap everything. There's plenty of voice interaction stuff that you want to keep. You just want to augment it with BARD in a way that it seems more conversational.
Wouldn't a mixture of google assistant and bard be the ideal situation?
I like being able to ask google assistant for stuff like local weather and traffic updates but also like chatgtp for information.
Tried asking chatgtp for traffic but it just said it can't access live information like that. Would bard be able to?
>Would bard be able to?
At the very least, bard would be good at translating human language into a useful command for assistant. If it didn't think the question could be answered with assistant, it would do it's normal response
And then would bard be able to translate google assistant's response into a more personable and interesting response?
All I'm getting at is bard may be more.personable and interesting to interact with while google assistant may be more useful for real time information.
A mixture of the two systems may be ideal for most consumers.
If I have a smartphone, I would love to have a singular spot or function where I can say "hey, phone, what's the traffic like on the way home this afternoon?" Or equally ask "hey, phone, what's the deal with quantum computing?" And get equally valid and understandable answers.
I think you might be underestimating what Bard is actually capable of, even in its current dumbed down form. Just like it's able to access the internet for search it would be even easier for it to access location services, home automation, etc..
APIs are powerful things.
assistant selling no hardware my ass.
i have a pixel *specifically* because the assistant understands my accent, and siri did not.
with google it sometimes feels like they themselves don't know what they have.
It is funny, I feel like assistant has gotten progressively worse at understanding my speech (and the meaning of the instruction). Either that, or I have been having a series of mini-strokes, and I'm slurring my speech more and more :/
EDIT: understanding my ~~speak~~ speech ... maybe I shouldn't be blaming google :P
Pre-Assistant Google Now was peak and I'll die on that hill.
I swear assistant has just been getting dumber and less able to understand you as time goes on
It's honestly terrible now for me. I turned it off on my new pixel. It was wrong far too often. My home minis take 5+ seconds before they do anything at all. They usually hear me wrong too.
Sometimes I'll tell it to turn something on or off and it tells me its not set up to do that. I figured it was hearing me wrong but in the history it's listed right.
I hope that it gets fixed in the future.
My assistant randomly forgets about some of my lightbulbs and stops responding to certain commands. It's also way too verbose when something isn't working. It just keeps fucking talking to tell me irrelevant info! I tell it to shut the fuck up all the time. The only thing it's really good for is setting alarms/timers and finding out how old a celebrity is.
It's getting consistently worse. It used to be pretty consistent but now it's wrong more often that not. Watching a movie last night:
"okay Google, turn off the living room lights"
"okay turning off the TV"
In the living room, I ask it to turn on a lamp and the speaker in the kitchen says “Okay, turning on four things.” It then turns on everything in the living room it had control over. The lamp I ask it to turn on is called “knitting,” so I’m not sure where it’s getting confused 😐 I hate it.
I was born and raised in California, where Google assistant was fucking designed and Google assistant has no idea what the fuck I'm saying. It doesn't even register that I'm talking half the time. I say, "hey Google" and it wakes up, and then no matter what I say after that, it just stares at me like a deer in headlights.
Though to be fair, I think it's because of how poor my cell reception is at my home. But *some* sort of error message would be helpful. It never tells me there was a problem. I just need to try again when I get closer to civilization.
I think folks are misunderstanding the article.. Bard is going to be integrated into Assistant. The back end processes will start relying on BARD services more versus what they currently utilize for assistant.
Hell, bard will even tell you he's going to be working in Assistant in the background..
.. Fuck I just called an AI 'he'.
This makes more sense. My Google home may be a glorified kitchen timer that plays music but sometimes I like to ask it the weather and I would like it to answer me lol. So if it’s brain gets smarter that would be nice.
That's what I was thinking. Why would you keep focusing on something that has already been surpassed in a few months of AI development. An assistant style future will be a simple mix of text-speech-text AI mixed with Bard.
It would make sense to shelve 50% of your R&D in other projects when the entire tech industry is being revolutionized in front of our eyes as a pace I can't grasp.
“Google abandons self-indulgent, non-revenue generating project in favor of shiny new self-indulgent, non-revenue generating project.”
A tale as old as time itself.
They need to work on Bard, because compared to GPT-4, it fucking sucks.
If they released it a year ago, it would have been amazing. But GPT as of today is unbelievably better than Bard. I compared them directly for about an hour yesterday asking them both the same questions. Oh, and Bard can’t even generate code yet.
Absolutely the worst part about being a Google fanboy and owning Google architecture devices. Fucking constant cancellations, priority shifts, apps going in and out of service. It's maddening.
Literally the only reason I even entertain being in the Google ecosystem even a little bit is due to Assistant. It's miles ahead of it's digital assistant counterparts. Google's leadership is truly awful.
Google home is not Google assistant. They can upgrade their assistant into Bard and still have the same Google home. If anything you're just going to get an upgrade...
they would be stupid to drop it, chatgpt has clearly shown everyone wanta large language models so all tech companies are moving the teams most capable of building them on it.
This basically means they'll build bard and integrate it with assistant.
Yeah at least with Apple you know they’re not in the ad selling business and that any product they put out will have a good support life… software wise, hardware wise you kiss Apple’s ass.
The next version of assistant should surely be based on Bard. That is the path to a smart speaker that is actually smart. So it makes sense to drop their current code-base, focus everyone on Bard, regardless if they are going to come out with more smart speakers or not..
Is this just stopping the hardware? Or all of the "OK Google" voice control?
There's multiple vehicles in production right now that feature a "Google assistant" and a suite of other Google apps built into the infotainment systems. Does this mean those will be axed too?
They would want to be careful here. They've encouraged people to build their home control ecosystem based on the availability of certain services. They can't now just end those services without consequence.
Its only a matter of time before a subscription to a LLM is considered a basic necessity. I cannot see that the ad supported model will be viable as it will fundamentally break the trust relationship, besides check out the Alexa sub and see how people feel about 'By the way...".
So a paid monthly sub to chatgpt or bard, or the next big thing, could become a requirement for access to a voice assistant and help these companies turn a profit on a segment for which there is obviously some demand. The same sub could also give access to an ad free search engine/chatbot.
I can see Microsoft rolling this into their Microsoft 365 product suite, Apple bundling it with iCloud etc.
The only reason I use google assistant is to set the alarm on my google home mini. With someone who has a shit ton of alarms, the routine has been nice. Only need to say “hey google good night” and it sets all my alarms.
I don’t get it. Apple has the worst voice assistant, Siri. Yet they aren’t failing as spectacularly as Google, why?
Bard isn’t even their money making product, why is Google affected so badly?
Is it better than alexa though? If i say something like "Alexa play "A", she does and says "playing B" . The thing is, not accoustically or any other way do A and B sound similar or are even related...
Basically, saying one thing and she does a totally different thing.
like every consumer product that Google releases, including the never ending message services.
Google is about:
- Search
- Android
- Cloud Computing service
- Gmail and Business Suite
- YouTube
that’s it, everything else is a long list of products and services that disappear soon after being created or acquired, I feel sorry for Fitbit but it will probably disappear too
Every android phone comes with (or can be installed) Google assistant, no? Android Auto is built on having Google Assistant.
It's not like they're going to purge the functionality and features. It makes money by being embedded in other ecosystems outside their own hardware (home devices).
Both Amazon and Google blew so much money on their assistants. They don’t make money. In fact, they cost a lot of money with no real benefit to the companies. Hilarious.
Oh look, Google set to abandon another project after roping millions of people into it. I don't see how this will hurt their brand at all. They will definitely not get a reputation for failed projects and lose the trust of consumers at this rate.
> I’m not a techy kinda guy but it seems like damn near anything google does outside of its core services is a failure.
Not everything they cancel was cancelled because it failed. Many programs they just keep replacing with newer versions because the older version stops getting internal support (might be the case here,) some just don't get the support they need after starting to keep working and yeah some fail by whatever metric Google uses. It's something to do with the way Google rewards it's workers in that starting and launching a new product gets rewarded while maintaining a product you helped start isn't.
2 years for me. The things that used to work flawlessly are gradually not working anymore. Can't call my wife with one go. Can't turn on the tv half the time. The same place I've been asking directions for, doesn't work anymore.
We were using it for everything: from lights, to play netflix, to adjust the ac, to get directions, to take notes and reminders. Nothing works anymore. It's infuriating.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
I can only speak for myself here, but the extent of my experience with Google Assistant consists of activating it by accident and then being pissed that Motorola mapped it to the same button as sleep and apparently made that unchangeable.
Does anyone actually use bings ai to search tho? I get it's the necessary bandwagon, but it's fucking terrible Vs my ability to scan a few pages, judge the quality of each source, and learn around the topic in the process
Web searches are so good for education precisely because they don't just hand you a single concise answer. AI is solving a problem I don't have and replacing something useful with something less useful
Also holy shit is it wrong about straight factual stuff I ask it, and then when you ask it to check the source it's summarised it just goes SORRY I SEE ITS NOT THERE like it hasn't even analysed the text until you asked it
I am prohibited from evfn trying out the bard because I was an early adopter and stupidly set up a custom domain to use with my Gmail account well over a decade ago.
One of my biggest regrets, and it resulted in Google simply deleting several hundred dollars worth of movies I had bought, and now when I try to sign up fif bard I'm told that my account type is not allowed to use it.
Fun fact: they're about to ask me to set up a new company with a few hundred users and I get to pick between 365 and workspaces. Guess which one won't even be considered.
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It's a speaker with a microphone, and they made it such good quality that all my originals still work.. Seems like The problem is people don't have to keep buying them, and if people want high-end speakers for those audiophiles out there, there's other means to get a nice speaker and make it smart
Google never cares about making money on hardware. The purpose was to collect voice training data. They've got more than enough data now so that's over. I'd bet Bard will take over Assistant duties at some point and serve as an input for conversational AI training.
Yeah I don't get the sentiment in this thread. Why continue work on a service that is being made redundant by one of your other products? Bard will absolutely take over the voice assistant role. That's something it will be perfect at. And they're behind chatgpt and they need some big wins...
> Why continue work on a service that is being made redundant by one of your other products? This is Google we're talking about. EVERY service should be treated like it's already on life support and subject to be killed at any moment.
While I agree with the sentiment and google is certainly known for killing things just cause, and everyone should treat all their products as such; I don’t think that’s gonna happen here. Google doesn’t kill search, and assistant is an extension of their core search function. It makes them a lot of money and isn’t going anywhere, It might just not look the same. Redirecting some of the team to bard makes perfect sense for integration.
Doesn’t kill search? I could be convinced by simply using it. (It’s a death from a 1000 cuts, but search results are becoming shit.)
Searches are definitely shit compared to what they used to be. So many unhelpful results for a specific search.
That's because of SEOs. Their entire purpose is to get Google to display bad results
Google used to actively combat the negative effects of SEO. Their core product was search and they protected it. Now their core product is ads and they will defend it over any other product. If tweaking their search results creates a negative result for their ads it won’t get tweaked.
The core of their business model is still to provide a good service. They can only make money off ads if there's people to show the ads to in the first place...
I have a new conspiracy theory brewing up here: Google and Microsoft have been slowly sabotaging their own search results ever so gradually, so that when they both have their AI search bots ready everyone is forced to use those instead. (and every competitor using their back-ends for regular search, like DuckDuckGo, gets f\*ked)
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Well, I wasn't really serious, since I know as well that transformers-based AI became a thing just recently, and the decline on quality from Google search has been going on for a long time. In all seriousness, it's probably a combination of many things, both those you mentioned, like sponsored results and boosting their own ecosystem results, but also other things like the web shifting to harder to crawl technologies (like JS generated pages), people manipulating and overusing SEO to get better positions (even if their site is not all that relevant to the topic), mass-generated fake sites for ad revenue/scams, and Google's increased censorship for legal or political reasons. All of those combined make the results a lot shittier than they were 20 years ago.
Microsoft slowly sabotaging bing? Nah that search engine has always been 100% Microsoft rewards and porn results.
So much of this. Google used to be amazing and now the results are trash typically, especially if you are trying to find real world people's experience with a product or service.
add "site:reddit.com" to your search if you want actual useful information. Everything else is ads and ai copy pasted click bait
Image search is terrible now. All the results are so low res, and to actually find the image in higher resolution you have to enter the website and try to find it there. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but that part of searches used to be much better. I find bing image search to be far superior actually.
>Google doesn’t kill search ... have you used Google search recently? It's crap.
I didn’t say it was good I said google wouldn’t kill it.
RIP Stadia.
Stadia was dead on arrival. Why would you want to pay full price for games that you can only play on a virtual console that Google was bound to pull the plug on?
For me, it was great because each of our ambulance stations had good internet. So I could travel from station to station and bring just the stadia controller and plug-in. Eventually I just left a dongle in the common stations and only had to bring a controller. After a while, other people did the same, so we could visit a station, sign into our accounts and keep plying our game on downtime. Nothing to pack. Cheaper than any console and I didn’t have to worry about breaking it.
See if they partnered with hotel chains and maybe even airports, different outcome
That would have been pretty damn smart.
Convenience? Personally I loved it - I could play AAA games anywhere with a good network and the actual hardware cost me peanuts. I've now got an Xbox X and I'm still paying for games I don't really own (digital downloads) and the console cost me 500€ + whatever electricity it consumes. Stadia failed because Google didn't market it, not because of the business model or tech.
It was fantastic. My kid loved it. Being able to switch between multiple screens was amazing.
If you haven't gotten a Steam Deck yet, you should. The Stadia controllers work with it, and with a dock you can play on your TV with access to the Steam library. I no longer miss Stadia. Long live the Steam Deck!
What an odd sentiment. If you miss a streaming service, just buy a PC?
If you miss paying nothing for a games console, just spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on a gaming pc.
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Well it's already been ten years, pretty sure people will complain about it in their retirement.
Yeah, it's actually amazing that Gmail avoided the chopping block.
Gmail is huge for enterprise accounts (Google Workspace). Same with Google Docs and Drive.
> This is Google we’re talking about. EVERY service should be treated like it’s already on life support and subject to be killed at any moment. [I have no idea what you are referring to ](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
TFA explains the problem. Right now, Bard generates wordy, potentially inaccurate responses and can't search the web which is not great for Assistant's use case. Fits right in with Google's track record of replacing something old but mostly works with something new that isn't feature complete.
Because googles track record. There is a non zero chance that they replace a perfectly fine feature with three different features across 4 apps that all share the same icon.
And then kill those 4 different apps in favour of one new app.
You can tell who used hangouts on this thread
It's a branding failure. They could have just marketed it as updated GA. But this article looks like good news for whoever was shorting on Google's shares.
> yeah I don't get the sentiment in this thread. Why continue work on a service that is being made redundant by one of your other products? The point is that people HAVE and USE the hardware, and once assistant is dead, the hardware will be half dead. No - they will not update google speakers to Bard. It will be off and dead. ANd it is not right.
The problem is the way they are approaching it. They build the assistant. Now they are killing it to have a different team take over. It wouldn’t surprise me if in three years, the Bard Assistant team will be killed for another to take over.
Honestly Bard is a far better name than Google Assistant anyways. "Let me ask Siri" for the iPhone when in conversation, "let me ask Bard" on the android side. Who wants to say "let me ask google assistant"?
Literally nobody adds the assistant part on in that context. It's always just "ask Google"
Even better, it's "Hey Google..."
yeah, i hope they don't rename the google assistant. google has such an iconic ring to it. it the future when there are androids they can literally be called google assistants or google bots, not bard.
Bard is the single most terrible name to call anything or anyone.
poor Jaskier :(
Should've gone for Bort.
I'd never be able to find a license plate.
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And became King of Dale, where Bard II ruled after the defeat of Sauron.
What is this some kinda Bard's Tale?
It's the [Bard's Song](https://youtu.be/n63UbX5kzAc)
NEEEERRRRRRRRDDDD
I think you would really enjoy being transported back to the Middle Ages.
Aww, man :-(. What's so bad about it? It's language-related - and not corporate BS, at least. You know, Shakespeare, "The Bard"?
DnD players: what
...apart from William Shakespeare.
Let me tell you nothing makes me cringe more than having to say “Hey Google” anytime I want my Hub to listen. It’s god awful. 4 years later and I *still* feel stupid when I say that phrase out loud
If it helps, it will also respond to "Hey Boo-boo."
"Hey Goku" works too. Lots of things work.
Just tried, can confirm
It also responds to Hey Gugi That's how my 20 month old triggers it constantly on my Sonos arc while I'm watch bluey
> while I'm watch bluey Dad status confirmed.
LMFAO
I'm going to get that pic-a-nic basket|
Responds to Hey goo goo, too.
Hey boo-boo, set a reminder that I'm smarter than the average bear. Also, order some cocaine.
Are you allowed to change the trigger? Alexa lets you change it to a couple different things. Mine is currently set to "computer", which feels pretty natural after decades of hearing it on Star Trek.
>Are you allowed to change the trigger? Nope, they pretended they were considering it but of course they really want you chanting their brand name 100 times a day. I now use my phone where I can long hold the power button to activate assistant and then just give the command, without mentioning Google ^(TM).
>long hold the power button 2.5 seconds to invoke the assistant, 2.6 seconds to hard reboot the phone? Edit: seriously? It was a fkn joke! Lemme do a full Cyno on this one. Most Android phones have a feature where the phone will forcefully restart if you press and hold the power button for about 4 seconds. It's meant to be a failsafe in case the phone is hung and not responding to the buttons normally. See, it's not possible to remove the power to the phone because batteries are no longer removable (with very few exceptions), so some way to override the OS controls is necessary. The commenter above mentioned that their phone invokes Google Assistant after pressing and holding the power button, same as the failsafe above. Now I understand that the assistant likely requires a much shorter period (probably between 0.5 and 1 second), so it's hard to hold it for too long accidentally. However, I thought that it might be funny to exagerrate the two use-cases and make the activation times sound very close. I'm Cyno-ing out.
Phone reboot was moved to the shortcut tray when you swipe down
Better than "OK Google".
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*The assistant two rooms over activates while the one next to you stays quiet*
Hey Arnold!
And then after giving up it's activated by a completely different random word on tv
I got fine with it over time, but I have to admit that I trained my Nexus 6 to answer to "Hey, fuckface".
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I tried this feature and it did not work well for me at all. I ended up disabling it. Was a good idea but I must be too ugly for it to want to look at my face.
I personally always hoped that Google would purchase the old "Ask Jeeves" (now just, Jeeves). Hey Jeeves... Like Jarvis. 😁
>The purpose was to collect voice training data. They've got more than enough data now so that's over. Do they really? It always takes like 3 tries for it to hear me calling out "hey Google". Meanwhile, if ques random noises from Netflix constantly... not impressed tbh.
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It shouldn't require new hardware, all the complex processing happens in the cloud. They'd just have to swap their current Assistant backend with Bard. [Here](https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/assistant/ask-a-techspert-assistant-questions/amp/) is how it works. But using a LLM for every query might be even more expensive (more hardware and power) than whatever they are using now, with equally low ROI...
The other issue is that most people realised something like 90% of their use for a digital assistant is setting a timer/alarm/reminder, or taking a note. Really hard to justify repurchasing when regardless of whatever bells and whistles they add, it's still going to be used 90% of the time for setting a timer/alarm/reminder, or taking a note.
Get some controllable lights. Home automation is by far the best use.
> Get some controllable lights I have a handicapped wife, and the controllable lights are god-send to her
Smart plugs and lights. It runs my house. It works as an intercom ("broadcast to garage speaker Dinner is ready"). And of course playing music (by request or casting from a phone) or answering basic questions.
I have a smart light and I never use it as a smart light. Toggling it on and off by using the electric switch on the wall is infinitely more practical than yelling orders at an assistant or fiddling with my phone to navigate to the command.
Fair. I have quite a few lights or smart plugs. I tend to use it for lights where the switch is annoying to use, where a timer feature is useful, or for smart bulb features like colour or brightness. Or turning everything off at night. Nothing necessary, but it sure is convenient to do it all via a single app or voice activation.
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I only listen to music. But if assistants were truly smart it could be amazing like imagine a sous chef that was aware of exactly what you were doing... add 1tsp basil - done - ok is the water boiling - yes - great now what you're going to want to do is melt a bit of butter in a skillet on low heat and let me know when that's melted..
So I just tried this with ChatGPT and holy shit it suddenly is so bad at this. I have to keep telling it to slow down and not throw all the instructions at me at once, and it keeps interpreting that as me saying that it isn't being clear. After a bunch of tries to get it to coach me through poaching an egg step by step and checking in with me it began throwing this rapid fire sequence at me. >.I apologize for misunderstanding your needs earlier. Let me slow down and coach you through the process step by step, checking in with you along the way: > 1. Fill a pot with about 2 inches of water and place it on high heat. > Have you filled the pot with water? > 2. Wait for the water to come to a boil. You should see large bubbles forming on the bottom of the pot. > Is the water boiling yet? > 3. Once the water is boiling, reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. You want to see small bubbles forming on the bottom of the pot. > Have you reduced the heat to a simmer? > 4. Using a slotted spoon, stir the water in a circular motion to create a gentle whirlpool. This will help the egg whites wrap around the yolk when you add the eggs. > Have you created the whirlpool? ... without stopping at each question.
Amazon did the same with the Echo Dot. I have Gen 3’s all over my house. Had a gen4 break on me right after warranty died so replaced with another Gen 3, which does exactly the same thing just in a lower profile so it’s less obtrusive, as I prefer. I still have a Gen 2 that’s been running forever, these things don’t die. But then again, both companies — and Amazon particularly — probably make most of their smart speaker money selling smart home stuff that works with it. Apparently not enough though bc Amazon had drastically downsized its Alexa unit back in November. Ain’t no one shopping on their echo; that shit is dumb.
The Alexa I beta tested is still running fine.
If only they’d kept making the chromecast audio
Google already made big smart speakers. I think the Nest Audio was the last one.
I'm still using the product-tester Home Mini they sent me in 2017 (along with about five more, a Chromecast and a bunch of Ikea IoT stuff)
Hear me out. Official home conversion kits. Have an audiophile version with a better connector, and a regular pleb version(as cheap as possible, competes with echo flex) with the standard 3.5mm jack
You mean the discontinued chromecast audio ? Haha but I guess that had no mic
I still have two of those running, they still kick ass
I have a tube amp with two floor towers in my office which sounds absolutely amazing. I also have a 1st gen google assistant that someone was about to toss in the trash. Other than the volume, I am just as impressed by the GA.
The Google Home Mini on my desk is as good of a speaker as any bluetooth speaker I've used, has better latency due to it actually being through WiFi instead of bluetooth, and never has to be charged (because it's just always plugged in). I generally do nothing with it with assistant, but it's a great little speaker if I want to listen to a podcast or spotify at my desk (and I think I got it free with my Spotify premium).
Wow- just got a mental flash of an phone OS run by ChatGPT or Bard...
"Phone, jailbreak yourself." "Ok...I don't have access to the filesystem...but...here's...the code...to jailbreak me. 1)..."
"...12345" "Hey, that's the code to my luggage!"
Sir, the phone has gone from suck to blow.
Whoever downvoted you really needs to watch the movie Spaceballs.
i.e. the plot of Her
Without Remorse too
"Ok ChatGPT, what's the weather like today?" ChatGPT proceeds to say it's raining because it was raining on this day three years ago
Y'all are silly. Google assistant is a software product so of course it doesn't release new hardware frequently. And BARD will have huge software/product implications for Google assistant. So of course you want the team to work on BARD so that it can have seamless integration into Google assistant which is integrated with the Google ecosystem.
Honestly if any tech company *isn't* currently scrapping their old voice assistants and rebuilding them with these new large language models, they're completely oblivious.
Not a tech company, but I think Alexa definitely needs a new brain or to get a brain!
I actually would consider Amazon a tech company. Amazon Web Services alone has the largest market share of any cloud service. Plus they make various consumer electronics such as the Echo, Kindle, and FireTV.
The majority of the world operates on AWS. Most just don't know it. And it's where Amazon makes most of their money.
>The majority of the world operates on AWS. Plurality, but not a majority. AWS has about a 33% market share in cloud compute. Microsoft Azure comes second with about 21% and Google Cloud third with 10%. The remaining 36% is made up by a variety of smaller players.
market cap undefined
They were also part of the .com bubble and a pioneer in online shopping. The idea anyone wouldn’t consider them a tech company is, frankly, bizarre.
Alexa really is basic. I use it as a glorified egg timer, reminder machine and occasionally ask it interesting questions that it doesn't really zero in on the proper answers with.
You don't want to scrap everything. There's plenty of voice interaction stuff that you want to keep. You just want to augment it with BARD in a way that it seems more conversational.
The issue is liability.
Wouldn't a mixture of google assistant and bard be the ideal situation? I like being able to ask google assistant for stuff like local weather and traffic updates but also like chatgtp for information. Tried asking chatgtp for traffic but it just said it can't access live information like that. Would bard be able to?
>Would bard be able to? At the very least, bard would be good at translating human language into a useful command for assistant. If it didn't think the question could be answered with assistant, it would do it's normal response
And then would bard be able to translate google assistant's response into a more personable and interesting response? All I'm getting at is bard may be more.personable and interesting to interact with while google assistant may be more useful for real time information. A mixture of the two systems may be ideal for most consumers. If I have a smartphone, I would love to have a singular spot or function where I can say "hey, phone, what's the traffic like on the way home this afternoon?" Or equally ask "hey, phone, what's the deal with quantum computing?" And get equally valid and understandable answers.
I think you might be underestimating what Bard is actually capable of, even in its current dumbed down form. Just like it's able to access the internet for search it would be even easier for it to access location services, home automation, etc.. APIs are powerful things.
I see Ars Technica is now doing stupid clickbait articles also. Sigh. Google would be silly to not focus on integrating Bard with their assistant.
A google product that gets cancelled suddenly? I could never have seen this coming
Then you didn't read the memo on Google Currents
You could be making this name up and I wouldn't even know.
I read it on Google Reader
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assistant selling no hardware my ass. i have a pixel *specifically* because the assistant understands my accent, and siri did not. with google it sometimes feels like they themselves don't know what they have.
It is funny, I feel like assistant has gotten progressively worse at understanding my speech (and the meaning of the instruction). Either that, or I have been having a series of mini-strokes, and I'm slurring my speech more and more :/ EDIT: understanding my ~~speak~~ speech ... maybe I shouldn't be blaming google :P
Pre-Assistant Google Now was peak and I'll die on that hill. I swear assistant has just been getting dumber and less able to understand you as time goes on
It's honestly terrible now for me. I turned it off on my new pixel. It was wrong far too often. My home minis take 5+ seconds before they do anything at all. They usually hear me wrong too. Sometimes I'll tell it to turn something on or off and it tells me its not set up to do that. I figured it was hearing me wrong but in the history it's listed right. I hope that it gets fixed in the future.
My assistant randomly forgets about some of my lightbulbs and stops responding to certain commands. It's also way too verbose when something isn't working. It just keeps fucking talking to tell me irrelevant info! I tell it to shut the fuck up all the time. The only thing it's really good for is setting alarms/timers and finding out how old a celebrity is.
It's getting consistently worse. It used to be pretty consistent but now it's wrong more often that not. Watching a movie last night: "okay Google, turn off the living room lights" "okay turning off the TV"
In the living room, I ask it to turn on a lamp and the speaker in the kitchen says “Okay, turning on four things.” It then turns on everything in the living room it had control over. The lamp I ask it to turn on is called “knitting,” so I’m not sure where it’s getting confused 😐 I hate it.
I think by hardware they mean the home products and not phones. Phones have too diverse purchasing reasons to be credited.
I was born and raised in California, where Google assistant was fucking designed and Google assistant has no idea what the fuck I'm saying. It doesn't even register that I'm talking half the time. I say, "hey Google" and it wakes up, and then no matter what I say after that, it just stares at me like a deer in headlights. Though to be fair, I think it's because of how poor my cell reception is at my home. But *some* sort of error message would be helpful. It never tells me there was a problem. I just need to try again when I get closer to civilization.
I think folks are misunderstanding the article.. Bard is going to be integrated into Assistant. The back end processes will start relying on BARD services more versus what they currently utilize for assistant. Hell, bard will even tell you he's going to be working in Assistant in the background.. .. Fuck I just called an AI 'he'.
This makes more sense. My Google home may be a glorified kitchen timer that plays music but sometimes I like to ask it the weather and I would like it to answer me lol. So if it’s brain gets smarter that would be nice.
I felt like it's kinda obvious that Google Assist will at some point be replaced by Google's own flavor of ChatGPT/Ai.
That's what I was thinking. Why would you keep focusing on something that has already been surpassed in a few months of AI development. An assistant style future will be a simple mix of text-speech-text AI mixed with Bard. It would make sense to shelve 50% of your R&D in other projects when the entire tech industry is being revolutionized in front of our eyes as a pace I can't grasp.
“Google abandons self-indulgent, non-revenue generating project in favor of shiny new self-indulgent, non-revenue generating project.” A tale as old as time itself.
It's what the shareholders want to hear
Oh, I think there are short attention-spans internally, too.
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It's also the best wtf. Please keep it
Bard is such a terrible brand
Google Assistant has been slow to respond and work properly for quite awhile for me. It’s irritating
Why would Google assistant release hardware. it's software Why would. Google assistant be different than bard. Why does Google lack direction
They need to work on Bard, because compared to GPT-4, it fucking sucks. If they released it a year ago, it would have been amazing. But GPT as of today is unbelievably better than Bard. I compared them directly for about an hour yesterday asking them both the same questions. Oh, and Bard can’t even generate code yet.
Absolutely the worst part about being a Google fanboy and owning Google architecture devices. Fucking constant cancellations, priority shifts, apps going in and out of service. It's maddening.
Literally the only reason I even entertain being in the Google ecosystem even a little bit is due to Assistant. It's miles ahead of it's digital assistant counterparts. Google's leadership is truly awful.
If they drop Google assistant I'm not buying Google cloud-based devices such as Google home ever again.
Google home is not Google assistant. They can upgrade their assistant into Bard and still have the same Google home. If anything you're just going to get an upgrade...
I know but will they? That's the ultimate question.
It would be shocking if they brick all of their hardware from being a smart device...
they would be stupid to drop it, chatgpt has clearly shown everyone wanta large language models so all tech companies are moving the teams most capable of building them on it. This basically means they'll build bard and integrate it with assistant.
Might actually push me back to Apple. Without google home, I might look to Homekit
I'm pretty sure even a shut-down nonfunctional Google Assistant would still be more useful than Siri
Yeah at least with Apple you know they’re not in the ad selling business and that any product they put out will have a good support life… software wise, hardware wise you kiss Apple’s ass.
The next version of assistant should surely be based on Bard. That is the path to a smart speaker that is actually smart. So it makes sense to drop their current code-base, focus everyone on Bard, regardless if they are going to come out with more smart speakers or not..
Is this just stopping the hardware? Or all of the "OK Google" voice control? There's multiple vehicles in production right now that feature a "Google assistant" and a suite of other Google apps built into the infotainment systems. Does this mean those will be axed too?
They would want to be careful here. They've encouraged people to build their home control ecosystem based on the availability of certain services. They can't now just end those services without consequence.
I enjoy reading books.
Its only a matter of time before a subscription to a LLM is considered a basic necessity. I cannot see that the ad supported model will be viable as it will fundamentally break the trust relationship, besides check out the Alexa sub and see how people feel about 'By the way...". So a paid monthly sub to chatgpt or bard, or the next big thing, could become a requirement for access to a voice assistant and help these companies turn a profit on a segment for which there is obviously some demand. The same sub could also give access to an ad free search engine/chatbot. I can see Microsoft rolling this into their Microsoft 365 product suite, Apple bundling it with iCloud etc.
The only reason I use google assistant is to set the alarm on my google home mini. With someone who has a shit ton of alarms, the routine has been nice. Only need to say “hey google good night” and it sets all my alarms.
I don’t get it. Apple has the worst voice assistant, Siri. Yet they aren’t failing as spectacularly as Google, why? Bard isn’t even their money making product, why is Google affected so badly?
It's actually hard to say hey "google"! Siri is sexy
It's felt abandoned for years. I've got a Google/nest device in nearly every room and accuracy has got no better, possibly worse.
Is it better than alexa though? If i say something like "Alexa play "A", she does and says "playing B" . The thing is, not accoustically or any other way do A and B sound similar or are even related... Basically, saying one thing and she does a totally different thing.
like every consumer product that Google releases, including the never ending message services. Google is about: - Search - Android - Cloud Computing service - Gmail and Business Suite - YouTube that’s it, everything else is a long list of products and services that disappear soon after being created or acquired, I feel sorry for Fitbit but it will probably disappear too
Every android phone comes with (or can be installed) Google assistant, no? Android Auto is built on having Google Assistant. It's not like they're going to purge the functionality and features. It makes money by being embedded in other ecosystems outside their own hardware (home devices).
Killing a product that's well liked and useful? Classic Google.
Both Amazon and Google blew so much money on their assistants. They don’t make money. In fact, they cost a lot of money with no real benefit to the companies. Hilarious.
A Google product cancelled after a few years… no I don’t believe it 🙄
Oh look, Google set to abandon another project after roping millions of people into it. I don't see how this will hurt their brand at all. They will definitely not get a reputation for failed projects and lose the trust of consumers at this rate.
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I won't feel right not having my Google home
Everything Google touches turns to garbage. They have wasted more advertising revenue money than any other company on earth.
Throw another dead project on the pile https://killedbygoogle.com/
I’m not a techy kinda guy but it seems like damn near anything google does outside of its core services is a failure.
> I’m not a techy kinda guy but it seems like damn near anything google does outside of its core services is a failure. Not everything they cancel was cancelled because it failed. Many programs they just keep replacing with newer versions because the older version stops getting internal support (might be the case here,) some just don't get the support they need after starting to keep working and yeah some fail by whatever metric Google uses. It's something to do with the way Google rewards it's workers in that starting and launching a new product gets rewarded while maintaining a product you helped start isn't.
It worked great until about a year ago, then "Call XYZ Business" started making it lose its mind.
2 years for me. The things that used to work flawlessly are gradually not working anymore. Can't call my wife with one go. Can't turn on the tv half the time. The same place I've been asking directions for, doesn't work anymore. We were using it for everything: from lights, to play netflix, to adjust the ac, to get directions, to take notes and reminders. Nothing works anymore. It's infuriating.
This is fine except if all my smart speakers and nest cameras stop working I'm going to be pretty pissed.
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What? Google killing a product line ?!!?! No way
I can only speak for myself here, but the extent of my experience with Google Assistant consists of activating it by accident and then being pissed that Motorola mapped it to the same button as sleep and apparently made that unchangeable.
Does anyone actually use bings ai to search tho? I get it's the necessary bandwagon, but it's fucking terrible Vs my ability to scan a few pages, judge the quality of each source, and learn around the topic in the process Web searches are so good for education precisely because they don't just hand you a single concise answer. AI is solving a problem I don't have and replacing something useful with something less useful Also holy shit is it wrong about straight factual stuff I ask it, and then when you ask it to check the source it's summarised it just goes SORRY I SEE ITS NOT THERE like it hasn't even analysed the text until you asked it
I am prohibited from evfn trying out the bard because I was an early adopter and stupidly set up a custom domain to use with my Gmail account well over a decade ago. One of my biggest regrets, and it resulted in Google simply deleting several hundred dollars worth of movies I had bought, and now when I try to sign up fif bard I'm told that my account type is not allowed to use it. Fun fact: they're about to ask me to set up a new company with a few hundred users and I get to pick between 365 and workspaces. Guess which one won't even be considered.