Technology

Bixby is better at basic tasks on the phone, like a calendar meeting.

Gemini is better at controlling my lights and to talk about something not too objective, like asking about cooking recipes. Or it's not bad if you need to calculate solution strengths while mixing drinks or smth. But aside from maths and other fixed constants, it's really shit at any sort of facts.

You can not get a reliable answer to as when a show/movie is airing because the times announced usually shift a bit and the datasets are old. In last December, before Kraven the Hunter was premiering, I asked it when that would be. It told me, in December 2024, that "Kraven the Hunter will premier in May 2024" or something. As in the future tense. And date 6 months in the past.

So yeah.

They're useful for certain things but they're still far from anything akin to Jarvis, lol. I've been meaning to give the one free month of Gemini Pro a go just out of curiosity at some point to see whether it's equally shit.

I can definitely see potential in these. It's pretty nice being able to control my lights just by telling my phone what colour where, how much light. Also I use it for a smart plug on my screen so when I'm watching things in bed I can just hit pause and tell google to shut my screen off for me instead of having to get out of bed or put it on standby (because then the annoying blue led will stay on).

AI is useless at actually helping with normal tasks.

It just straight up stopped sending me reminders that I've scheduled. Literally the one thing I used it for.

This is because hardcoded human algorithms are still better in doing stuff on your phone than AI generated actions.

It seems like they didn’t even test the chatbot in a real live scenario, or trained it specifically to be an assistant on a phone.

They should give it options to trigger stuff, like siri with the workflows. And they should take their time and resources training it. They should give app developers a way to give the AI worker some structured data. The AI should be trained to search for correct context using that API and that it plugs the correct data into the correct workflow.

I bet, they just skipped that individual training of gemini to work as phone assistant.

Apple seems to plan exactly that, and that is way it will be released so late VS the other LLM AI phone assistants. I’m looking forward to see if apple manages to achieve their goal with AI (I will not use it, since I will not buy a new phone for that and I don’t use macOS)

I generally use Google assistant to do about 4 things.
Check the weather, set a timer for X minutes, remind me to do something later today (ie: get the mail at 4) and set an alarm.

After 'upgrading' to Gemini I tried to get it to set a timer or something and it wanted access to all kinds of information that is irrelevant to setting a goddamn timer.

I promptly disabled it and went back to Google assistant, which does these 4 basic things without prying into my everyday life.

Who cares? Stop using Google products. They are an evil company.

Pure conjecture on my part but I think...

When these first came out, Google approached them in full venture capital mode with the idea of building a market first, then monetizing it. So they threw money and people at it, and it worked fairly well.

They tried making it part of a home automation plaform, but after squandering the good will and market position of acquisitions like Nest and Dropcam, they failed to integrate these products into a coherent platform and needed another approach.

So they turned to media and entertainment only to lose the sonos lawsuit.

After that the product appears to have moved to maintenance mode where people and server resources are constantly being cut, forcing the remaining team to downsize and simply the tech.

Now they are trying to plug it into their AI platform, but in effort to compete with openai and microsoft, they are likely rushing that platform to market far before it is ready.

My most common use for Google assistant was an extremely simple command. "Ok Google, set a timer for ten minutes." I used this frequently and flawlessly for a long time.

Much like in your situation it just stopped working at some point. Either asking for more info it doesn't need, or reporting success while not actually doing it. I just gave up trying and haven't used any voice assistant in a couple of years now.

Now try to add an extra layer of crap with English not being your native language. At this point only zoom gives fairly correct transcripts, both apple and Google are on the "you know what, I'm rather typing this shit" level

The Assistan/Nest devices have gone to shit as well. When I first bought one about 5 years ago, it could:

• play many games (voice-controlled text adventures, multi-player gameshow-style trivia and party games, etc.);
• play music from my Google Music Library library with no commercials;
• play podcasts from 3rd party podcast providers;
• play almost any radio station that also had livestream feeds

Now all the games are gone, and 'podcasts' are just the small subset of podcasters who also upload their episodes to Youtube (whatever feed they used to use had almost every podcaster there was, even obscure ones); asking for specific episodes by episode number or date is totally broken. Playing radio stations is hit or miss, the voice recognition often picks a stream completely unrelated to the one I ask for; it is waaay worse at matching the callsign/city I ask for.

Playing music is intolerable. There's a stupid commercial for Youtube Music Premium after nearly every track. NO, I will not upgrade to your freaking Youtube Premium.

Enshittification, thy name is Google.

Google as an organization is simply dysfunctional. Everything they make is either some cowboy bullshit with no direction, or else it's death by committee à la Microsoft.

Google has always had a problem with incentives internally, where the only way to get promoted or get any recognition was to make something new. So their most talented devs would make some cool new thing, and then it would immediately stagnate and eventually die of neglect as they either got their promotion or moved on to another flashy new thing. If you've ever wondered why Google kills so many products (even well-loved ones), this is why. There's no glory in maintaining someone else's work.

But now I think Google has entered a new phase, and they are simply the new Microsoft -- too successful for their own good, and bloated as a result, with too many levels of management trying to justify their existence. I keep thinking of this article by a Microsoft engineer around the time Vista came out, about how something like 40 people were involved in redesigning the power options in the start menu, how it took over a year, and how it was an absolute shitshow. It's an eye-opening read: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

I have a theory that this is intentional design.

When products perform smoothly, you don't interact with them, they become invisible, & Uncle Googs needs you interacting with their products as much as possible.

Thanks to telemetry, Good Ol' Uncle Googs has millions of hours of behavioral patterns to sift through, provided by all those free Chromebooks for school districts across the US.

So Google know exactly what gets folks engaging with their phones &, I believe, intentionally cause frustration over seemingly simple tasks b/c many many people will forget what they were doing, fix the issue, then get distracted by entertainment apps, doom scrolling, etc.

Dark patterns & behavioral manipulation.

Google Assistant on Android and Home devices gets markedly worse as time goes on. My Google Home can barely even figure out how to turn on lights anymore. Things that used to be amazing have devolved into "I don't understand".

It's really quite shocking and hurts a little bit because it feels like everything in the world is degrading and decomposing like in some dystopian novel or something.

How can such amazing technology get worse? Is it really just "we can't make money off this"?

This is by design. They're trying to frustrate you, because they'll then upsell you on the "premium" subscription later on that returns the "old ways," all while mining your data. And if you continue to use the free stuff, they'll just mine you harder with AI.

They're angling for a rent-based economy where they're the landowners and we're the sharecroppers paying to use their stuff. The only way out is to de-google and start taking your privacy seriously.

Weird. My Google Pixel 9 Pro XL has 3 navigation buttons.

That's something that's customizable using the stock firmware.

Settings -> Display & touch -> Navigation mode.

My Google Assistant still responds to "Hey Google" or "ok Google" just fine as well on my Google phone.

Just so you know, your name's visible in the "Gemini crashes" image.

I think that this is the result of a KPI.

At some point there was a fight inside Google between engineering and marketing about how to proceed with product development. Engineers wanted a better product, marketing wanted more eyeballs.

As a result, search became about "engagement", or "Moar clicks is betterer".

Seen in this light, your triggering of the assistant four times increased your use and thus your engagement. An engineer would point out that this is not a valid metric, but Google is now run by the marketing and accounting departments, not by engineers.

Another aspect that I only recently became aware of is that in order to get promoted, you need to make a global impact. This is why shit is changing for no particular reason or benefit and has been for a decade or so.

They have no incentive to fight the voice assistant war anymore. That decisively ended in the late 2010's with no winner, because they moved onto the next buzzword technology by then. At this point, GA is just on life support, and will continue being a piece of garbage, as they remove more features from it, under the notion that the userbase is not large enough.

I'm wondering if there's a paid and private-ish personal assistent. I'm turning away from all the software where I'm the product. Any ideas?

I have had a Google home for years and I wholeheartedly agree. It is like they lobotomized it a couple of years ago?
Commands that it could do when I bought it, to my amazement (wow it can do that‽), is long gone. Now it feels like it struggles even with the most simple commands such as playing news or turning on a light.

Wonder what happened.

Edit: oh yeah, and it has become sexist as fuck. It won't listen to commands whatsoever from women. If a man tries the exact same command it executes it.
Voice models retained and all.

The reason? It’s right there in the title:

Google.

I don't use it often but lately it stopped being able to turn off my flashlight for no reason. Can only turn on. I wonder if it's just to get people to use Gemini. It's a shame because I found the normal assistant capable enough for my needs.

I can't address most of it, but under gesture navigation there's an option to swipe from the corner to invoke the assistant. I entirely agree that the power button is for "power", and I don't know why you would try to change that.