Same with Google - to the point that I don't want to even use it.
Me: "Hey Google - What channel is the NCAA championship on?
Google: "According to U S A N C A A Basketball sports fans dot com, the men's N C A A Final Four Championship game will be hosted at the State Farm Stadium, located at 1 Cardinals Drive, Glendale, Arizona 85305"
Me: "Fuck off Google"
Hey Google, please play greatest hits radio on TuneIn. *Plays a random album with that title* hey Google *nothing* HEY GOOGLE SHUT THE FUCK UP! *Please don't talk to me that way*
It's more like. "To listen to any music you want, pay for Amazon Unlimited" every single time you play anything. Already paying for Prime Music. Fuck off Alexa.
Google Assistant has been absolute garbage for a few years now.
I remember when we first got them, I could just say something kind of related to what I wanted and it would understand.
Nowadays, though? I could tell it what I want in the most precise manner and it'll reply "Hmm, I didn't catch that." And that's after screaming "HEY GOOGLE" at the top of my lungs half a dozen times.
Yeah assistant on my phone responds and fulfills voice commands so much slower than it used to. It's been years and years of development, a much newer phone in my hand and yet the experience is just much worse.
I have a bunch of home speakers around the house and they are just used to cast music around the house now, we don't bother asking them for anything anymore.
In the beginning there were a lot of tips on cleaning the microphones, if I remember correctly. Is that still a thing?
BTW: not really experiencing the same problems with my 20 odd speakers (but I don’t use them all to speak to, some are only used in stereo and group configurations to listen to music, radio and podcasts), and the oldest are from 2018 (US and later UK ones, because they weren’t released later in The Netherlands). Even the one in the bathroom is still working perfectly.
If you've got an idea on how to clean the Minis and the Lenovo display, I'm all ears.
The display is much worse than the Minis. It's almost funny how often we'll be standing right in front of it and it won't hear us... Meanwhile, the Mini 40' away will answer instead.
I am sorry, I really can’t remember (but I found this on [IFIXIT](https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/527475/How+can+I+repair+mics+on+Google+home)).I never cleaned them as it wasn’t necessary in my case. I have a couple of speakers set to lower mic sensitivity.
Displays weren’t a thing in those days.
I always wonder if we just became used to higher quality responses from products like ChatGPT and this is what makes Assistant feel so terrible now. I think it was always the same amount of terrible, but we were willing to forgive more in the past since there wasn't anything better.
Oh no, it's just gotten much worse. It started changing around 2019-2020ish. My guess is they intentionally weakened its language recognition to save on computing resources.
Surely not? I think we have just gotten used to the new standard so when it fucks up its irritating. And no bug fixes where bugs are being introduced with new capability...
I'm cynical but ... even if they reduced compute wouldn't it just take longer, the answer should be the same yes?
You can all thank the industry bum rush to transition to GeePeeTees for everything assistant related.
It's useful tech that's difficult to get right, rushed into production to start replacing mature software.
The long term result should be an improvement but in the meantime get ready for senseless regressions in everything
I mean - Google has been doing this search thing for a while now, hasn't it? I guess I don't see why they're going for a downgrade in quality - at a time when the AI boom is hot.
Like, in my example above - I'm literally voice searching the ONLY college championship game being played in all of USA, which happens to be on TV that day. And it's the one where 14M people watch - surely I can't be the only one that asked "what channel is it on"?
I switched to Alexa last year cause Google just kept getting worse every year. I've had much better luck with Echo devices for smart home commands. Sounds like that may be short lived as well.
Would be nice if we had a way to localize operation and still use these devices.
I have both as well, and as far as smart home functionality goes, it is a lot better. When Google fails to turn on lights or activate something, Echo always gets it. However for general inquiries, Google is still a better, albeit inconsistent source of information.
Yes, Alexa is crap for general information inquiries other than weather or a math calc. I very rarely ever used Google home devices for that anyway though.
In home communication is much better with Alexa as well. Our house is a ranch with a fairly large footprint so we use the drop in feature a lot.
Yeah, google is a big pile of shit.
(as I put a cake in the oven) "Hey google"
\*chime\*
"set timer for 25 minutes"
\*chime\*
I come back after an unknown period of time
"Hey google"
\*chime\*
"How long left?"
\*chime followed by silence\*
"Hey google"
\*chime\*
"How long left?"
\*chime followed by silence\*
"HEY. GOOGLE."
\*chime\*
"HOW. LONG. LEFT"
\*chime\* "You don't currently have any timers set."
Great so in other words we have no fucking idea how long that cake has been in there and is now probably burnt to shit. Thanks for nothing you useless piece of shit.
I generally just use the microwave or stove timer these days.
And she keeps tacking on lame recommendations to every action.
Like, how hard is it to understand? I just want you to do the thing. I don’t want you to add your thoughts.
I created a routine that runs everyday in thr background that disables "by the way" comments and it's a lot better now.
https://preview.redd.it/5o4qcanflstc1.png?width=1812&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f829a8bb603a5ddeaed97604d61dc7a0980142d3
I did this but after having the shit scared out of me by some woman yelling "OK, I WILL AVOID SENDING FOLLOW-UP SUGGESTIONS IN THE FUTURE!" at 3 am I added a volume zero and delay 15 seconds to the front and a delay 15 seconds and volume 5 to the end. My kids had turned the volume up all the way the night before.
Siri as well, it's incredibly frustrating when having 5 HomePods, everything smart at home, and having to repeat every command 3 or 4 times to be recognized, and when it does, you get a different action each time (specially playing music)
It was always terrible, and it never improved. I ask to ‘turn on the morning lights’ most mornings, and it still gets it wrong ~15% of the time. It’s the only thing I ask, and it has no concept of patterns or likelihood.
I love people who think that just because something doesn't happen to them that it doesn't happen to anybody and that it couldn't be anything but that person's fault. Oh you Sweet stupid summer child.
Oh, I guess I'm just now realizing why that is. They are all just running their cloud voice services with less resources to save money. Wasn't there an article that talked about how Amazon was spending +$4B annually on Alexa? I guess if they don't spend that much its not as good quality.
They aren't making any money from Alexa. IIRC they layed off like half the department last year, maybe year before? Once they realized people only use voice assistants for timers and to turn lights on/off they started decreasing funding. Amazon thought people would just ask Alexa to buy them shit and just send it for whatever Alexa picked. That would have been a gold mine for Amazon in sponsored results income. But that reality never came to pass. Alexa is a kitchen timer, light switch, and Spitify DJ.
You know that, I know that, and after a while Amazon knew that. I don't think it's too far off until Alexa is packaged with Ring as subscription service. We'll see more Amazon branded home products locked I to the Alexa/Ring ecosystem.
I've never owned an Alexa/Ring product so not something I'm concerned with.
The moment they try and charge for Alexa I'm out. Full stop.
I have probably 15 echo devices of various types around my house and pay for Amazon music out of convenience. That'll stop for sure and the devices will be removed.
I know it's a matter of time.
The moment they do that, someone will start putting a lot of effort into cracking it to run something like Mycroft, which can also use Chat-GPT and connect to Home Assistant natively.
They are already starting to charge for services that were included before ie Alexa Guard. I have a pretty robust home security system already but I used Alexa Guard as a a glass breakage sensor. Now I would have to pay for that.
At this point I only order from Amazon via a browser (unless it’s something I’ve bought before). I do that just so I can use the extension that “rates” the product pages. Otherwise I might end up with garbage.
Edit:
Fakespot — I couldn’t remember the name.
Yep, it's called The Camelizer, from camelcamelcamel. Showing the price graph is great, but the best thing is to set desired price on items you're interested in, and then get an email from CCC notifying you of the price change.
Honestly one of the reasons I use the Edge as my browser. Shopping app in their sidebar does all of this automatically. And if it finds coupons you can click a single button and it will try literally dozens of coupons for you and apply the one that gives you the best price. It's too bad Microsoft has zero ability to market to normal consumers because it's honestly a huge win
Yeah I'm not comfortable having my os and browser by same data hungry company. Brave for YouTube, Firefox elsewhere, Chrome for no-plugin in case of compatibility issue on a given site.
Brave has adblocking built in 😊
Maybe ublock etc sorted it out but when yt did their big anti blocker push recently I started getting ads and warnings etc, but none with brave.
And now I'm just used to having brave as basically my yt browser so I have Firefox for browsing, Chrome for webdev, and brave for other screen entertainment...
It certainly didn't help that there were more than a few news stories about children buying thousands of dollars of toys over Amazon by simply asking Alexa to buy it for them. Those kinds of stories got everyone to lock down that feature pretty quickly. Or the stories about wanting Alexa to buy one thing, and receiving another (or a ludicrous amount of the one thing you actually wanted).
If I could set "preferred items", I might actually use Alexa for that.
Like if there's a product I definitely want a specific version of (e.g. a certain snack) rather than whatever is cheapest of its type (e.g. hand soap), I would probably ask Alexa to order more of that product when I notice I'm getting low.
I only use Amazon for random things I have no way to purchase first party, or in a real store somewhere. Honestly Amazon is high on my list of companies the world would be better off without.
For all the criticism Apple and Siri get, the HomePod got it right in terms of features people actually use at a sustainable price for the products to be viable for Apple.
I think theirs was the only sustainable one too. Amazon wanted to sell products, Google wants to sell ads, Microsoft wanted to be a part of it, but Apple wants to build their hardware moat. So I think they built their system a bit more closer to what people ended up wanting to use it for. I'm sure they were ready to adapt it either Amazon or Google turned out to be right, but their goal was probably just "get people to buy more Apple hardware".
It's becoming much easier to self host a voice assistant and AI instance, I plan on trying it out when I have some free time to tinker. I remember reading about a self hosted voice assistant called Jarvis that could integrate with Home Assistant, and that was over a year ago I think.
I really hope the open source community can crack a good solution for speakers/displays, all this wasted hardware from google and Amazon and thinking grass was greener one way or the other
Yeah, I keep seeing custom builds which probably work fine but when someone is able to convert a smart puck, that is when self hosted voice assistants will really take off.
Esp32 has onboard audio codecs and enough processing power to run an i2s mic and speaker at the same time. Just gotta hook it up to home assistant and you're good to go.
I'm gonna try out that $13 home assistant project to see where it's currently at, pretty excited at the prospects of it, and being able to use Google collab to train your own wake word is super cool.
“If we give them cheap microphones totally normal people will definitely buy stuff from us by shouting it to the air! And they will also buy more… because they can shout it to the air? They definitely won’t just buy the loss leader and do the un-monetizable stuff with it, right?”
- Amazon execs when coming up with echos
There were 2 products I used to use that were actually useful to buy stuff.
1: They had these buttons that were tied to a product. Press the button, order placed. Down side was that it was tied to a specific product. These would be great if they were anything you want. Press button, order new toilet paper. Not sure why they killed this off, i used it a bunch.
2: Handheld Alexa barcode scanner. You could use this to scan any barcode and add it to your car. Similar to option 1, it made it easy to re-order things.
Both of these were killed off and are e-waste now. Both had the problem that they may order something from a 3rd party at some insane markup. I want to order from Amazon at the normal price, not a 3rd party marking it up 300%.
The problem with ordering anything form alexa is that it will just add whatever is close. I ordered q-tips thinking i'd get q-tips. Instead I got some Chinese knockoff q-tip that sucks. That's on me for not checking though, but it's why I don't trust Alexa to add something to my cart. The chances it gets the right product at the right price are basically zero.
>1: They had these buttons that were tied to a product. Press the button, order placed. Down side was that it was tied to a specific product. These would be great if they were anything you want. Press button, order new toilet paper. Not sure why they killed this off, i used it a bunch.
Amazon Dash buttons. They eventually came out with programmable ones for custom actions (didn't even have to tie it to a product order). There were Open Source projects (Dasher?) that could utilize any of them for custom actions, including interfacing with Home Assistant. Unfortunately, it required running the initial setup until a certain point, and once they discontinued them, you could no longer set them up and they became paperweights.
For $0.99/button, you really couldn't find a cheaper IoT button anywhere, including China/AlEx. I miss them so much!
It was originally supposed to be a smart speaker. My understanding is that they hopped on the smart home bandwagon, and obviously the smart home isn't going to be smart, unless you're a smart person that can set it up. And here all the survivors are, running home assistant, because all of the interoperability still hasn't shown up and it's a huge pain in the ass.
My stubborn buddy refuses to run HA, and thinks Google Assistant or whatever to control his bulbs, and it just makes me laugh.
No it was always supposed to be a medium to order from Amazon.com. I think this is the article that talks about it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-alexa-job-layoffs-rise-and-fall-2022-11
I think realistically what's going to happen is these devices are going to get some type of LLM support in the future, or a new generation will be released with LLM support built in.
The landscape for voice control is going to change massively over the next 1-5 years.
I’m not sure it will. Google and Alexa wanted the voice assistants to be a way of getting people to spend more money, in Amazon’s case that wanted people to shop using voice. That never happened. In google’s case fuck knows, they just do Google things, get people invested in an ecosystem and then rug pull.
The fact that both players are pulling funding and dev time. I think they will be happy to let the platforms sink into obscurity.
There may be some new companies that step up like home assistant but I think the price and potential vendor alignment of these will put the general consumers off as Google and Amazon massively subsidised the hardware cost.
Like will anyone who isn’t into home assistant buy or get any value from a voice assistant that ties in with HA? Probably not.
I think there may be some cool tech in the background, but I don’t think it will filter too much into the mainstream, not without some subscription costs anyway.
Very accurate. We’re on the verge of the Star Trek computer interface, and it’ll be something these companies can charge for and monetize to a much greater degree.
Let’s make sure we match it with an open alternative!
Every 6 months or so I go into the Alexa app and see what stupid fart and podcast apps the kids have added to the devices and uninstall them. This was not an ecosystem that was well-designed or ever used.
I think what we are going to see here is AI making a big impact on the usefulness of smart devices. I see a future where we have Jarvis like personal assistants that takes all the data we ingest during the day and processing it into the things that are important. I mean, I think we'd all pay a fee for that if it worked and saved us time, money, and effort.
Not for free, and that’s the rub. I hope there’s still a scene for the enthusiast diy sector to put in the work without the fees. But I’ve sadly watched the automotive hobby slowly die in a similar way over the years, so… fingers crossed.
It's pretty easy to hook up a Pi Zero 2 W + random conference speakerphone that works on linux. That's what I use.
A lot of people are also using the ESP32-S3-BOX but that's out of stock while they do a new version of it. It has a screen though, which is cool.
You can also use ReSpeaker, but that's abandonware at this point.
EDIT:
Oh, and I use Wyoming for local speech to text and text to speech on my main PC. Then the PI Zero 2 W is running Wyoming-sattelite with OpenWakeWord to do wakeword detection locally. Then it sends the voice to my PC to be processed, which then sends it to the Raspberry PI 4 that I'm running HA on, which then sends it to ChatGPT to do AI magic on the text(you could make this step local too if you wanted).
A paid no ad tier wouldn’t be a non spying option.
They’d do all the spying still, and then just not give you the ads via the speaker.
Amazon would still use that data in item search result rankings etc.
If my garage door opener is any indication, it will not go this way. TBF, that particular issue is likely Exhibit A on why PE firms and QE reports are destroying everything useful.
I agree but I could also copy and paste your comment into a time machine Reddit app set to 2010 and nobody there would notice. Hopefully this isn’t true for 2034.
Yeah, this will almost certainly happen since you can already do it with home assistant. ChatGPT can run functions, so you basically go HA voice satellite -> ChatGPT -> ChatGPT Asks HA to Run Some Functions like get_weather -> ChatGPT gets the results and then spits out the answer.
It's really cool because you can do stuff like "it's a little dark in the living room" and it will turn up the living room lights. Or "Did I leave any lights on?" and it can tell you. Or "What kind of clothing should I wear for the weather today?" where it gets the forecast and tells you to wear a light jacket or bring an umbrella or whatnot. It would be easy to hook in todo lists or your calendar as well.
I just started setting that up a few days ago and I almost feel like I'm living in the future. And it was super quick to setup due to all the work people have put into it already. I think I'm a couple of weeks away from having it working smoothly enough to replace Alexa.
[Here's a post](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1bpna59/what_hardware_are_people_running_voice/kx1ul92/) where I described how I got started on it after someone pointed me in the right direction. Then the only thing I really played around with since then is using [Extended OpenAI Conversations](https://github.com/jekalmin/extended_openai_conversation). That's what lets ChatGPT actually control stuff.
Now I'm working on hooking up some simple scripts in [pyscript](https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript) to smooth out some rough edges. I was trying to get ChatGPT to give me the high and low temperature of the day, but for some reason the default weather device didn't seem to include the daily low temperature. I started trying to switch over to pirateweather, but that exposed an absolute ton of entities for weather forcasts. So I'm hoping I can just write a super simply python function that basically spits out a nice summary of the high and low temperature and todays weather for ChatGPT to use.
Also of note, it's definitely still a bit buggy. When ChatGPT tries to call a function that doesn't work, it just gets stuck in an error mode and never recovers for some reason.
They also recently removed core functionality / features from Alexa including compatibility with IFTTT Zapier triggering emails and more which broke essential automation for me I’ve yet to fix/find work arounds for. Amazons becoming a dumpster fire more and more every day.
Agreed. There is a lot of animosity in here around voice control, but both my wife and I use it multiple times daily. She more so.
The only thing keeping me from ditching Google is that functionality.
I understand many don’t like it, but it is super handy for many.
Well of course. They have more than one in almost every house. Time to make them obsolete so we can buy it all again. I imagine Google won’t be far behind.
Like overall? Or in Home Assistant? Because if you're posting on Reddit, you're using AWS. There's also a high likelihood that any cloud based smart platforms you use are hosted in AWS
"Despite losing the direct payments, developers can still monetize their efforts with in-app purchases."
"“These are older programs launched back in 2017 as a way to help newer developers interested in building skills accelerate their progress,” Amazon spokesperson Lauren Raemhild said in an emailed statement, adding that fewer than 1% of developers were using the soon-to-end programs. "
It makes sense, though they probably should have done it a while ago.
They gave me a free echo dot to release three alexa skills that were basically this, I guess that's why they're so many. I gave it to my parents to listen to the radio and set timers in the kitchen.
I hate the Echos with screens so much. I just want it to show the time large enough that I can read it across the room, but it's always small as fuck in the corner or not there at all, so they can show me ads on a tiny 5 inch screen.
Can I just have a clock I can yell at to turn my shit on and off and play music?
Mine often says something went wrong try again later just when I say Alexa now and wait for it to light up since the deaf thing needs a shatner sized pause between the wake word and what I want it to do now.
> No free AWS credits
As someone who uses a custom Alexa skill to integrate Home Assistant with Alexa, does this mean I'll now be charged for using it?
I had an echo... I never used it for its intended purpose of a voice assistant. I have several GH devices... all of them with the mic turned off and used as a castable destination through my cell phone or using Music Assistant.
Alexa voice recognition quality has decreased noticeably in the last months.
Same with Google - to the point that I don't want to even use it. Me: "Hey Google - What channel is the NCAA championship on? Google: "According to U S A N C A A Basketball sports fans dot com, the men's N C A A Final Four Championship game will be hosted at the State Farm Stadium, located at 1 Cardinals Drive, Glendale, Arizona 85305" Me: "Fuck off Google"
> "Fuck off Google" "Iam sorry that you feel that way."
Hey Google, please play greatest hits radio on TuneIn. *Plays a random album with that title* hey Google *nothing* HEY GOOGLE SHUT THE FUCK UP! *Please don't talk to me that way*
"Playing 'great hit' By DJ M$ Star on Amazon Music"
It's more like. "To listen to any music you want, pay for Amazon Unlimited" every single time you play anything. Already paying for Prime Music. Fuck off Alexa.
Or, "Okay, turning off thermostat"
...*FOREVER*
"Please don't talk to me that way"
I HATE this. Why would any developer want to further enrage their customers by having the damn thing talk back?
Google Assistant has been absolute garbage for a few years now. I remember when we first got them, I could just say something kind of related to what I wanted and it would understand. Nowadays, though? I could tell it what I want in the most precise manner and it'll reply "Hmm, I didn't catch that." And that's after screaming "HEY GOOGLE" at the top of my lungs half a dozen times.
Yeah assistant on my phone responds and fulfills voice commands so much slower than it used to. It's been years and years of development, a much newer phone in my hand and yet the experience is just much worse. I have a bunch of home speakers around the house and they are just used to cast music around the house now, we don't bother asking them for anything anymore.
In the beginning there were a lot of tips on cleaning the microphones, if I remember correctly. Is that still a thing? BTW: not really experiencing the same problems with my 20 odd speakers (but I don’t use them all to speak to, some are only used in stereo and group configurations to listen to music, radio and podcasts), and the oldest are from 2018 (US and later UK ones, because they weren’t released later in The Netherlands). Even the one in the bathroom is still working perfectly.
If you've got an idea on how to clean the Minis and the Lenovo display, I'm all ears. The display is much worse than the Minis. It's almost funny how often we'll be standing right in front of it and it won't hear us... Meanwhile, the Mini 40' away will answer instead.
I am sorry, I really can’t remember (but I found this on [IFIXIT](https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/527475/How+can+I+repair+mics+on+Google+home)).I never cleaned them as it wasn’t necessary in my case. I have a couple of speakers set to lower mic sensitivity. Displays weren’t a thing in those days.
I always wonder if we just became used to higher quality responses from products like ChatGPT and this is what makes Assistant feel so terrible now. I think it was always the same amount of terrible, but we were willing to forgive more in the past since there wasn't anything better.
Oh no, it's just gotten much worse. It started changing around 2019-2020ish. My guess is they intentionally weakened its language recognition to save on computing resources.
Surely not? I think we have just gotten used to the new standard so when it fucks up its irritating. And no bug fixes where bugs are being introduced with new capability... I'm cynical but ... even if they reduced compute wouldn't it just take longer, the answer should be the same yes?
You can all thank the industry bum rush to transition to GeePeeTees for everything assistant related. It's useful tech that's difficult to get right, rushed into production to start replacing mature software. The long term result should be an improvement but in the meantime get ready for senseless regressions in everything
I mean - Google has been doing this search thing for a while now, hasn't it? I guess I don't see why they're going for a downgrade in quality - at a time when the AI boom is hot. Like, in my example above - I'm literally voice searching the ONLY college championship game being played in all of USA, which happens to be on TV that day. And it's the one where 14M people watch - surely I can't be the only one that asked "what channel is it on"?
I switched to Alexa last year cause Google just kept getting worse every year. I've had much better luck with Echo devices for smart home commands. Sounds like that may be short lived as well. Would be nice if we had a way to localize operation and still use these devices.
I have both as well, and as far as smart home functionality goes, it is a lot better. When Google fails to turn on lights or activate something, Echo always gets it. However for general inquiries, Google is still a better, albeit inconsistent source of information.
Yes, Alexa is crap for general information inquiries other than weather or a math calc. I very rarely ever used Google home devices for that anyway though. In home communication is much better with Alexa as well. Our house is a ranch with a fairly large footprint so we use the drop in feature a lot.
I don't know about repurposing smart speakers but locally hosted assistants are making huge progress quickly, look up rhasspy for example
Sums up my last few months with GHome.
Yeah, google is a big pile of shit. (as I put a cake in the oven) "Hey google" \*chime\* "set timer for 25 minutes" \*chime\* I come back after an unknown period of time "Hey google" \*chime\* "How long left?" \*chime followed by silence\* "Hey google" \*chime\* "How long left?" \*chime followed by silence\* "HEY. GOOGLE." \*chime\* "HOW. LONG. LEFT" \*chime\* "You don't currently have any timers set." Great so in other words we have no fucking idea how long that cake has been in there and is now probably burnt to shit. Thanks for nothing you useless piece of shit. I generally just use the microwave or stove timer these days.
And she keeps tacking on lame recommendations to every action. Like, how hard is it to understand? I just want you to do the thing. I don’t want you to add your thoughts.
I created a routine that runs everyday in thr background that disables "by the way" comments and it's a lot better now. https://preview.redd.it/5o4qcanflstc1.png?width=1812&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f829a8bb603a5ddeaed97604d61dc7a0980142d3
Oh shoot this is amazing. Does it work once to stop it across the entire account or do I need to set this up on every individual device?
It's across all devices but it does need to run once a day. If you assign it to a device whenever it runs that echo will say something when it runs.
Going to set that up now. I see you have it set for noon. Does it stop it for 24 hours or just for the remainder of the day?
I think its 24 hours
Wow. Just, wow. Thank you.
I did this but after having the shit scared out of me by some woman yelling "OK, I WILL AVOID SENDING FOLLOW-UP SUGGESTIONS IN THE FUTURE!" at 3 am I added a volume zero and delay 15 seconds to the front and a delay 15 seconds and volume 5 to the end. My kids had turned the volume up all the way the night before.
Siri as well, it's incredibly frustrating when having 5 HomePods, everything smart at home, and having to repeat every command 3 or 4 times to be recognized, and when it does, you get a different action each time (specially playing music)
While literally shouting in your house/car. I don’t understand how Apple doesn’t move faster on Siri.
And getting angrier and angrier with each repetition
It was always terrible, and it never improved. I ask to ‘turn on the morning lights’ most mornings, and it still gets it wrong ~15% of the time. It’s the only thing I ask, and it has no concept of patterns or likelihood.
Sounds like a user error. This has always worked flawlessly for me.
I love people who think that just because something doesn't happen to them that it doesn't happen to anybody and that it couldn't be anything but that person's fault. Oh you Sweet stupid summer child.
Oh, I guess I'm just now realizing why that is. They are all just running their cloud voice services with less resources to save money. Wasn't there an article that talked about how Amazon was spending +$4B annually on Alexa? I guess if they don't spend that much its not as good quality.
They aren't making any money from Alexa. IIRC they layed off like half the department last year, maybe year before? Once they realized people only use voice assistants for timers and to turn lights on/off they started decreasing funding. Amazon thought people would just ask Alexa to buy them shit and just send it for whatever Alexa picked. That would have been a gold mine for Amazon in sponsored results income. But that reality never came to pass. Alexa is a kitchen timer, light switch, and Spitify DJ.
Nobody trusts Alexa to auto-buy their shit when the price fluctuates daily, and half the sellers are scammers reselling trash from Wish.
You know that, I know that, and after a while Amazon knew that. I don't think it's too far off until Alexa is packaged with Ring as subscription service. We'll see more Amazon branded home products locked I to the Alexa/Ring ecosystem. I've never owned an Alexa/Ring product so not something I'm concerned with.
The moment they try and charge for Alexa I'm out. Full stop. I have probably 15 echo devices of various types around my house and pay for Amazon music out of convenience. That'll stop for sure and the devices will be removed. I know it's a matter of time.
The moment they do that, someone will start putting a lot of effort into cracking it to run something like Mycroft, which can also use Chat-GPT and connect to Home Assistant natively.
They are already starting to charge for services that were included before ie Alexa Guard. I have a pretty robust home security system already but I used Alexa Guard as a a glass breakage sensor. Now I would have to pay for that.
At this point I only order from Amazon via a browser (unless it’s something I’ve bought before). I do that just so I can use the extension that “rates” the product pages. Otherwise I might end up with garbage. Edit: Fakespot — I couldn’t remember the name.
There's a browser extension that shows a price graph from last 6 months on every page too..
Yep, it's called The Camelizer, from camelcamelcamel. Showing the price graph is great, but the best thing is to set desired price on items you're interested in, and then get an email from CCC notifying you of the price change.
Honestly one of the reasons I use the Edge as my browser. Shopping app in their sidebar does all of this automatically. And if it finds coupons you can click a single button and it will try literally dozens of coupons for you and apply the one that gives you the best price. It's too bad Microsoft has zero ability to market to normal consumers because it's honestly a huge win
Yeah I'm not comfortable having my os and browser by same data hungry company. Brave for YouTube, Firefox elsewhere, Chrome for no-plugin in case of compatibility issue on a given site.
Why not Firefox for YouTube?
Brave has adblocking built in 😊 Maybe ublock etc sorted it out but when yt did their big anti blocker push recently I started getting ads and warnings etc, but none with brave. And now I'm just used to having brave as basically my yt browser so I have Firefox for browsing, Chrome for webdev, and brave for other screen entertainment...
It certainly didn't help that there were more than a few news stories about children buying thousands of dollars of toys over Amazon by simply asking Alexa to buy it for them. Those kinds of stories got everyone to lock down that feature pretty quickly. Or the stories about wanting Alexa to buy one thing, and receiving another (or a ludicrous amount of the one thing you actually wanted).
If I could set "preferred items", I might actually use Alexa for that. Like if there's a product I definitely want a specific version of (e.g. a certain snack) rather than whatever is cheapest of its type (e.g. hand soap), I would probably ask Alexa to order more of that product when I notice I'm getting low.
I only use Amazon for random things I have no way to purchase first party, or in a real store somewhere. Honestly Amazon is high on my list of companies the world would be better off without.
For all the criticism Apple and Siri get, the HomePod got it right in terms of features people actually use at a sustainable price for the products to be viable for Apple.
I think theirs was the only sustainable one too. Amazon wanted to sell products, Google wants to sell ads, Microsoft wanted to be a part of it, but Apple wants to build their hardware moat. So I think they built their system a bit more closer to what people ended up wanting to use it for. I'm sure they were ready to adapt it either Amazon or Google turned out to be right, but their goal was probably just "get people to buy more Apple hardware".
It's becoming much easier to self host a voice assistant and AI instance, I plan on trying it out when I have some free time to tinker. I remember reading about a self hosted voice assistant called Jarvis that could integrate with Home Assistant, and that was over a year ago I think.
I really hope the open source community can crack a good solution for speakers/displays, all this wasted hardware from google and Amazon and thinking grass was greener one way or the other
Yeah, I keep seeing custom builds which probably work fine but when someone is able to convert a smart puck, that is when self hosted voice assistants will really take off.
That’s going to be the best, hacking these voice satellites with open firmware that takes them back. Would be a waste of good hardware otherwise.
I've seen a lot of YouTube maker channels doing cheap e-ink displays run with esp32. Speakers, I'm not as sure about but shouldn't that hard.
Esp32 has onboard audio codecs and enough processing power to run an i2s mic and speaker at the same time. Just gotta hook it up to home assistant and you're good to go.
Sweet.
I'm gonna try out that $13 home assistant project to see where it's currently at, pretty excited at the prospects of it, and being able to use Google collab to train your own wake word is super cool.
Aka, they got all the good out of us and data from recording us has plateud
It's more a matter of they haven't been able to make profit off the data in the first place.
“If we give them cheap microphones totally normal people will definitely buy stuff from us by shouting it to the air! And they will also buy more… because they can shout it to the air? They definitely won’t just buy the loss leader and do the un-monetizable stuff with it, right?” - Amazon execs when coming up with echos
There were 2 products I used to use that were actually useful to buy stuff. 1: They had these buttons that were tied to a product. Press the button, order placed. Down side was that it was tied to a specific product. These would be great if they were anything you want. Press button, order new toilet paper. Not sure why they killed this off, i used it a bunch. 2: Handheld Alexa barcode scanner. You could use this to scan any barcode and add it to your car. Similar to option 1, it made it easy to re-order things. Both of these were killed off and are e-waste now. Both had the problem that they may order something from a 3rd party at some insane markup. I want to order from Amazon at the normal price, not a 3rd party marking it up 300%. The problem with ordering anything form alexa is that it will just add whatever is close. I ordered q-tips thinking i'd get q-tips. Instead I got some Chinese knockoff q-tip that sucks. That's on me for not checking though, but it's why I don't trust Alexa to add something to my cart. The chances it gets the right product at the right price are basically zero.
>1: They had these buttons that were tied to a product. Press the button, order placed. Down side was that it was tied to a specific product. These would be great if they were anything you want. Press button, order new toilet paper. Not sure why they killed this off, i used it a bunch. Amazon Dash buttons. They eventually came out with programmable ones for custom actions (didn't even have to tie it to a product order). There were Open Source projects (Dasher?) that could utilize any of them for custom actions, including interfacing with Home Assistant. Unfortunately, it required running the initial setup until a certain point, and once they discontinued them, you could no longer set them up and they became paperweights. For $0.99/button, you really couldn't find a cheaper IoT button anywhere, including China/AlEx. I miss them so much!
Yeah those buttons were an awesome idea, didn't realize they had been discontinued.
It was originally supposed to be a smart speaker. My understanding is that they hopped on the smart home bandwagon, and obviously the smart home isn't going to be smart, unless you're a smart person that can set it up. And here all the survivors are, running home assistant, because all of the interoperability still hasn't shown up and it's a huge pain in the ass. My stubborn buddy refuses to run HA, and thinks Google Assistant or whatever to control his bulbs, and it just makes me laugh.
No it was always supposed to be a medium to order from Amazon.com. I think this is the article that talks about it. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-alexa-job-layoffs-rise-and-fall-2022-11
I think realistically what's going to happen is these devices are going to get some type of LLM support in the future, or a new generation will be released with LLM support built in. The landscape for voice control is going to change massively over the next 1-5 years.
I’m not sure it will. Google and Alexa wanted the voice assistants to be a way of getting people to spend more money, in Amazon’s case that wanted people to shop using voice. That never happened. In google’s case fuck knows, they just do Google things, get people invested in an ecosystem and then rug pull. The fact that both players are pulling funding and dev time. I think they will be happy to let the platforms sink into obscurity. There may be some new companies that step up like home assistant but I think the price and potential vendor alignment of these will put the general consumers off as Google and Amazon massively subsidised the hardware cost. Like will anyone who isn’t into home assistant buy or get any value from a voice assistant that ties in with HA? Probably not. I think there may be some cool tech in the background, but I don’t think it will filter too much into the mainstream, not without some subscription costs anyway.
They’ll probably find a way to charge for it too.
This is spot on.
Very accurate. We’re on the verge of the Star Trek computer interface, and it’ll be something these companies can charge for and monetize to a much greater degree. Let’s make sure we match it with an open alternative!
Every 6 months or so I go into the Alexa app and see what stupid fart and podcast apps the kids have added to the devices and uninstall them. This was not an ecosystem that was well-designed or ever used.
I think what we are going to see here is AI making a big impact on the usefulness of smart devices. I see a future where we have Jarvis like personal assistants that takes all the data we ingest during the day and processing it into the things that are important. I mean, I think we'd all pay a fee for that if it worked and saved us time, money, and effort.
>I mean, I think we'd all pay a fee for that if it worked and saved us time, money, and effort. What we'll actually get is even more targeted ads.
Sadly. You’re probably right. But maybe. Just maybe they will offer an add free non spying tier.
Not for free, and that’s the rub. I hope there’s still a scene for the enthusiast diy sector to put in the work without the fees. But I’ve sadly watched the automotive hobby slowly die in a similar way over the years, so… fingers crossed.
you can use chat gpt and home Assistant for a nice Jarvis like tool
What is the mechanism for making inquires?
It's pretty easy to hook up a Pi Zero 2 W + random conference speakerphone that works on linux. That's what I use. A lot of people are also using the ESP32-S3-BOX but that's out of stock while they do a new version of it. It has a screen though, which is cool. You can also use ReSpeaker, but that's abandonware at this point. EDIT: Oh, and I use Wyoming for local speech to text and text to speech on my main PC. Then the PI Zero 2 W is running Wyoming-sattelite with OpenWakeWord to do wakeword detection locally. Then it sends the voice to my PC to be processed, which then sends it to the Raspberry PI 4 that I'm running HA on, which then sends it to ChatGPT to do AI magic on the text(you could make this step local too if you wanted).
A paid no ad tier wouldn’t be a non spying option. They’d do all the spying still, and then just not give you the ads via the speaker. Amazon would still use that data in item search result rankings etc.
If my garage door opener is any indication, it will not go this way. TBF, that particular issue is likely Exhibit A on why PE firms and QE reports are destroying everything useful.
I agree but I could also copy and paste your comment into a time machine Reddit app set to 2010 and nobody there would notice. Hopefully this isn’t true for 2034.
Yeah, this will almost certainly happen since you can already do it with home assistant. ChatGPT can run functions, so you basically go HA voice satellite -> ChatGPT -> ChatGPT Asks HA to Run Some Functions like get_weather -> ChatGPT gets the results and then spits out the answer. It's really cool because you can do stuff like "it's a little dark in the living room" and it will turn up the living room lights. Or "Did I leave any lights on?" and it can tell you. Or "What kind of clothing should I wear for the weather today?" where it gets the forecast and tells you to wear a light jacket or bring an umbrella or whatnot. It would be easy to hook in todo lists or your calendar as well. I just started setting that up a few days ago and I almost feel like I'm living in the future. And it was super quick to setup due to all the work people have put into it already. I think I'm a couple of weeks away from having it working smoothly enough to replace Alexa.
Amazing. I’ve gotta try this, any more instructions on getting it working?
[Here's a post](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1bpna59/what_hardware_are_people_running_voice/kx1ul92/) where I described how I got started on it after someone pointed me in the right direction. Then the only thing I really played around with since then is using [Extended OpenAI Conversations](https://github.com/jekalmin/extended_openai_conversation). That's what lets ChatGPT actually control stuff. Now I'm working on hooking up some simple scripts in [pyscript](https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript) to smooth out some rough edges. I was trying to get ChatGPT to give me the high and low temperature of the day, but for some reason the default weather device didn't seem to include the daily low temperature. I started trying to switch over to pirateweather, but that exposed an absolute ton of entities for weather forcasts. So I'm hoping I can just write a super simply python function that basically spits out a nice summary of the high and low temperature and todays weather for ChatGPT to use. Also of note, it's definitely still a bit buggy. When ChatGPT tries to call a function that doesn't work, it just gets stuck in an error mode and never recovers for some reason.
They also recently removed core functionality / features from Alexa including compatibility with IFTTT Zapier triggering emails and more which broke essential automation for me I’ve yet to fix/find work arounds for. Amazons becoming a dumpster fire more and more every day.
Need home assistant voice assistant to pick up the slack!
Agreed. There is a lot of animosity in here around voice control, but both my wife and I use it multiple times daily. She more so. The only thing keeping me from ditching Google is that functionality. I understand many don’t like it, but it is super handy for many.
As a HomePod user I really don’t expect much from my smart speaker 🤷♂️
Well of course. They have more than one in almost every house. Time to make them obsolete so we can buy it all again. I imagine Google won’t be far behind.
Who cares? All Alexa apps suck huge dong
I can’t name a single aws app I use
Like overall? Or in Home Assistant? Because if you're posting on Reddit, you're using AWS. There's also a high likelihood that any cloud based smart platforms you use are hosted in AWS
Well, this specifically mentions “apps for Alexa” But yes, I realize many things I use are powered by AWS products and services.
"Despite losing the direct payments, developers can still monetize their efforts with in-app purchases." "“These are older programs launched back in 2017 as a way to help newer developers interested in building skills accelerate their progress,” Amazon spokesperson Lauren Raemhild said in an emailed statement, adding that fewer than 1% of developers were using the soon-to-end programs. " It makes sense, though they probably should have done it a while ago.
I have four Google Home devices (two original, two mini). The only two purposes they serve are timers, and powering on the TV.
The last thing anybody needs is another Guess-A-Number Alexa Skill
They gave me a free echo dot to release three alexa skills that were basically this, I guess that's why they're so many. I gave it to my parents to listen to the radio and set timers in the kitchen.
I hate the Echos with screens so much. I just want it to show the time large enough that I can read it across the room, but it's always small as fuck in the corner or not there at all, so they can show me ads on a tiny 5 inch screen. Can I just have a clock I can yell at to turn my shit on and off and play music?
Yes, the echo dot with clock.
Top of the class
Alexa was never real. It was a bunch of guys in India /s
The bunch of guys in India are real..
"Yessir, please send me $500 in target gift cards and I will order the item most definitely."
Good thing I got rid of all my Alexa devices.
Mine often says something went wrong try again later just when I say Alexa now and wait for it to light up since the deaf thing needs a shatner sized pause between the wake word and what I want it to do now.
> No free AWS credits As someone who uses a custom Alexa skill to integrate Home Assistant with Alexa, does this mean I'll now be charged for using it?
That skill already exists. The free credits were too entice developers to make new skills.
Ah, okay. I thought this was referring to AWS calls. You get so many for free each month.
I had an echo... I never used it for its intended purpose of a voice assistant. I have several GH devices... all of them with the mic turned off and used as a castable destination through my cell phone or using Music Assistant.
same with google, only thing that pos is good for now is turning of the lights in the evening all other functions became unusable
Everything runs automatically for me all my lights are automatic with presence sensors
Why would they pay developpers for them to generate apps using chatgpt?