I am shocked…shocked! that Google would let a product die on the vine and cease supporting it. Google assistant is dead, long live Gemini assistant!
Its about generating investor buzzwords and killing off beloved apps every 3-6 months.
I Still get their apps confused because of the stupid icon updates…or maybe I stupid and can’t learn new things.
Their new icons are so dumb. I think they thought people would get used to them but no, they’re still bad after several years.
Same, never had that issue with the old logos
It does take me several seconds to realize which one is which, so I sometimes go by their arrangement on my home screen. Avant-garde design, I guess.
I assume this is going to arrive at the solution of “Upgrade to Gemini-supported devices today!” Yeah, no thanks. I wish I could get Home Assistant working with my nest minis.
Don’t put extra internet connected microphones in your house.
I work for an un-named company that makes stuff that has google assistant on them. Initially we put hardware mutes and piped the microphones to physical hardware that monitored for wake up words locally and would then start piping the microphone data to the mother ship once it was heard. Google told us to stop that, only way to certify the product as compatible with Google Assistant was to pipe the raw microphone data to the mother ship 24/7. That was 5 years ago and I removed all devices from my house.
I just ditched my nest camera after 6ish years. Fuck the spys
I do wonder, is it possible to flash custom firmware onto the nest cameras? I don’t have any, but it would be a pity for alright hardware to go to waste.
So Google half baked a product, pushed it to the public whether they wanted it or not, and now it’s giving up on it replacing it with another half baked product nobody asked for…
Seems par for the course for Google
In all fairness, in the early days of Google Assistant it really was useful. It actually worked. Somehow in the last 5 years it plummeted. As in it stunningly and noticeably kept getting worse year after year.
I have been saying for years my phone was so much smarter in 2015. I don’t know what happened. I could rename it talk to it and it was responsive and did what was asked. Crazy.
My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn’t have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I’d write, “Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room.” Of course then we’d have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we’d receive a reply saying, “Fine, turn on the light in the dining room.” The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.
We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.
George Orwell was wrong. We didn’t need the government to bug our houses, we did it ourselves. 🤦♂️
Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.
Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it’s completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
How is the speaker in that? I have some atoms and the speaker sucks. Thinking about buying a bunch of these Google devices and replacing the PCB but I’d rather save the time if something like this actually has good sound.
For music, it’s not great. For voice, it’s pretty good. It’s decently loud and legible. There’s no bass. The mics however are pretty good. As far as I’ve read, you can’t get the mics to work well unless they’re tuned for that speaker in physical placement and hardware/firmware. The HA speaker uses the same kind of DSP chip that makes it possible for it to hear well in worse than ideal conditions which makes speech recognition work so well. So yeah, if you don’t wanna faff with stuff and you don’t care about music, just get it. It’s got 3.5mm TRS out if you wanna hook a proper speaker for music. The DAC is probably not amazing for HiFi but should you want to hook up something like a JBL Charge, I imagine it should work. In fact I’m planning to do this in another room where I used to use a larger Google Nest speaker for music.
Does it work with music assistant in HA? Thanks for the response btw
Not sure what a music assistant is. The speaker acts like a media player in Home Assistant. Actually now that I think about it, I don’t know how I’d play music on it. It doesn’t seem to do cast. 🤭
I’m curious about this as well. I think all the components are available, but nobody’s clicked them together yet.
My understanding is the software is the problem, I don’t understand why though.
Long time google assistant user, but them putting Gemini in it is what I’m afraid of, not the solution.
This is yet another “google released a product, didn’t know what to do with it, and made zero updates over the last decade, so now they’re killing it.” I don’t think they’ve ever fixed the bugs that existed the first day I bought mine. The speaker is handy for casting to, but also cast is a shitty non-open protocol.
Kinda just agree with the “everything in this space sucks” unfortunately.
I don’t use Google assistant to control any other devices but the amount of stuff I ask 'hey Google’s to do over the last few years has gotten worse than when it first started. More often now I just play music to it via Bluetooth connection.
It can’t even properly schedule reminders anymore, the one fucking thing I used to for.
If they kill Home. I’m done with Google products. I’m heavily integrated into nest and Google home. If they kill it further. I’m out.
If you really do swear them off, you will have dodged the next many bullets. They have made a solid pattern of killing off things we want. Generally, things we want don’t make them enough money.
I used to support the Home team. I saw them grow from nothing when I worked there. It’s pathetic what they are doing to everything.
5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that “AI” is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year’s more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they’ve ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.
Give me a good non-cloud voice control system that works and I’ll switch in a second. And on another note: The “Hey Google” command is so fucking annoying.
Found the one in the picture in my office while I was cleaning. I just threw it away
I don’t use Google Wiretap, but I use google assistant on my watch to control the smarthome, and I would be very, very disappointed if it was dead
