Yeah. They did exactly that
except the AI has even less features
It’s not, basic functionality has been lost, and instead of completing your requests, it initiates a search/conversation.
A few commands did work and it routed it through Assistant, but after failing my daily tasks I promptly uninstalled.
Don’t you have to install the Gemini app for all the features now? The app that specifically states it’s “experimental”
History always comes back at some point
And only for the US too.
worse? What did I miss - it was never good to start with. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant - all they were ever used for was set timers and play songs.
AI is the only hope to make them marginally more useful than they are.
set timers
This broke for me a few months ago. It just randomly… won’t start, despite saying otherwise.
My wife cannot set timers on our Nest Hub. It just doesn’t understand her command. I’ll say the exact same sentence right after and it’ll work. We did reset her voice profile, remove/add her back, checked all settings possible, nothing worked. Such a decent piece of hardware (speakers are actually pretty good, and the screen is decent and bright) that’s ruined by shitty software. It’s been unplugged for the last month and I didn’t even care. It’s going on Marketplace next week lol
“Set a timer that goes off at 9:15 am”
*It proceeds to lecture me on the difference between an alarm and a timer, also, sets neither. *
Well they are different, so why would it set one if you didn’t specify what do you mean exactly
Ah, I think the wording confuses it.
Timers are set for a duration. Alarms are set for a time. Which makes sense btw, you can’t set an egg timer to 9:15 either, you set it for, say, 21 minutes (if it’s 8:54 right now). And you don’t set your alarm clock for “in 6 hours”, you set it for 8:00.
It’s a bit arbitrary, but this is exactly where I feel models such as Gemini or ChatGPT can actually improve things, because they can more readily leap from the keyword “timer” expecting a duration to that you actually meant “alarm” from the rest of the input, you just said timer instead.
Location-aware reminders is almost literally all I want from an assistant these days. “Remind me of x next time I’m at y, or by z time at the latest.” Is this an impossible task? I can imagine how I would code it, but maybe I’m missing something.
I think they just haven’t figured out how to monetize it, really. I agree that it’s totally codable. I could do it with tasker if it were my job, IE, I was paid to and had 8h a day to do it.
Sometimes it can’t connect to the server (which is a completely stupid necessity).
That’s where it does the voice processing. The only processing it does on-device is the wake word and taking commands. Actually figuring out what you mean is done in The Cloud. Doing that on-device would not only make the devices significantly more expensive, but they would also rapidly become outdated.
The rest of your complaints are valid and I’ve experienced them all myself to boot.
I disabled the Google App back when “Google Now” was still a thing. Remember when it would give you directions to get where you were going after you were already on your way? I’d be on the train, it’d tell me “oh, you wanna go somewhere? Get off the train, take a cab to the nearest train station, get on the train…”
They removed everything but sports score tracking, I kept using it for a while, and then I realized that I could just fucking use my browser for search, since that’s where I wanted to read search results anyway. And that’s what I did.
They’re going to keep doing this again and again, making their app worse and worse.
No idea why I would ever want the Google app back.
