Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant::Up to 20 employees working on Google’s Assistant team have been cut.

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
76 points

I’m about to throw my google speakers away at this point. I feel like they are becoming more and more useless. Voice commands used to work fine, but lately this is a standard occurance.

“Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights.”

“I’m sorry. It looks like that device hasn’t been set up yet.”

“Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights.”

“Power controls are not available at this time.”

“Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights”

…lights turn on…

permalink
report
parent
reply
18 points

Alexa is the same and used to work fine. My favorite is “Alexa, turn on the fan” turns on the fan in my mother’s room but “Alexa, turn off the fan”correctly turns off the fan in my bedroom. I ended up getting a HomePod and using home assistant to add all my devices to HomeKit. Shit on Siri all you want but at least she can turn the right devices on and off and on first try.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

The enshittification will continue until quarterly profits improve…

…then they will continue to continue.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

I unplugged mine a few weeks ago. I realized literally the only thing I use it for is occasionally finding my phone… besides that, it fucks up basically every instruction I give it

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

It works reasonably well for timers, alarms and weather.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Mine is a glorified kitchen timer that occasionally plays Spotify while I do dishes.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Except that it ALWAYS continues to listen after the command and you have to yell at it to fuck off.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Oh really? I can no longer get it to set a recurring alarm every monday through thursday. It’s just not understanding any of the commands there that it did before.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

I’ve never before been so glad to read about someone else’s misfortune. Mine have been doing this for MONTHS and I thought it was just me imagining things

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

same. throwing out my speakers as they understand less each day as it feels. now its only a clap light switch and everything else, i at least have to ask 2 times

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Unplugged mine last week. Fuck em.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Honestly, I pretty much only use mine for relatively cheap home speaker groups.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Every time I hear about some proprietary thing getting effectively bricked by the company that sold them so they don’t have to support them forever, I wonder “what did you think was going to happen?”

permalink
report
parent
reply

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Create post

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


Community stats

  • 18K

    Monthly active users

  • 11K

    Posts

  • 505K

    Comments