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I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

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Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#131

Post by meindnoch »

nbzso wrote: post #96

The biggest unanswered question for me in recent years is how educated people with a tech background have trusted a big corporation which publicly stated years ago that they existence goal is to build the digital GOD (AGI). It's beyond my imagination. The same with OpenAI craze now. Why I would give my personal or corporate information to them or Microsoft? To learn more about my process patterns and RLHF their model…

Maybe "educated people with a tech background" aren't as intelligent as you thought?

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#132

Post by mcsniff »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #128
kps wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored. As someone who had been working at Google in this space (Nest Hubs, Matter, and planned thing I couldn't tell you about even if I knew its current status) until the decimation, I assure you it's not only products that get left behind.

>I assure you it's not only products that get left behind. Could you please enlighten us what else gets left behind?

People.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#136

Post by osigurdson »

cogman10 wrote: post #119
largepeepee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored. Many of Google's software eventually get worse too. YouTube for example has killed most of their social features by removing dislikes, limited searchability of videos by channel, allowed bots to fill the comments. And Google search has so much malware in their ads that pop up first, that even govts are recommending ad blockers by default.…

Google is just shit. As my company briefly decided to look into using them for a cloud provider it quickly became apparent that they are just awful stewards of any software that isn’t related to advertisements. It’s beyond shocking how amateurish GCP is being operated. My assumption is it comes down to really awful leadership. They only care about making and selling new things. You simply can’t trust that any piece o…

That is interesting, I thought GCP might be a good alternative - at least for managed Kubernetes.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#137

Post by jeroenhd »

briHass wrote: post #93
zamalek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google devices with my HA setup just fine (although I want to move away). HA just added integrated assistant support, so I'm keen to try that out when I get back from vacation.

Does the HA voice assistant support require HA Cloud or whatever they're calling it? The price for that $6/m felt a bit steep for what it provided, though supporting HA development is appealing. When I started to read through the non-cloud option, I saw some analog telephone and POTS modem requirements and my eyes glazed over.

> Does the HA voice assistant support require HA Cloud or whatever they're calling it?

I've set it up with a Google API key. The process of getting an API key isn't very smooth (Google's backend is terrible and guides from just a week ago may already be outdated if you're unlucky) but after pasting three magical strings it works very well. It supports most sensors and devices I've tried it with.

I've only had it fail because some Google can't do natural language parsing for some of the software sensors I've set up on HA ("how many days until my website's certificate expires") but for your standard smart lights/blinds/presence detection/etc. it'll work just fine.

This is the guide I used: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/

Everything but step 4.9.2 and step 5 are messing around in Google dashboard but they seem to have updated the dashboard these days. All of this messing around with APIs is probably why they recommend people to just use their cloud offering.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#138

Post by somat »

visarga wrote: post #52
Sosh101 wrote: post #15

I can't understand people that want to wire up every aspect of their home to big tech cloud companies. There are plenty of options for self-hosted smart home setups.

When I realized I need to register all my light bulbs and appliances and control them by janky wireless signals, with reconnect issues from time to time, I just gave up and use physical switches. They work all the time. Why would I want to open or close a light when I am 100 steps away from the button?

My plan is to physically wire everything into a controllable switch.

Then I started thinking, what sort of switch is programmatically controllable, uses open standards has a large number of ports is vendor interchangeable. and it hit me. a POE ethernet switch.

Now I just have to find a source of 48V leds.

hashtag: only_half_joking.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#139

Post by jeroenhd »

c4mpute wrote: post #37
gondaloof wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can HA do that Google/Alexa can’t?

Break even faster. Upgrading HA is a chore, it frequently breaks, ceases to understand its own configuration, drops integrations.

I've had that experience a few times a few years ago, but these days I don't even enable the "make a backup" checkbox when I upgrade HA.

Things seem to break more if you pull in external software repositories (HACS) but that's to be expected.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#140

Post by dangus »

hackernewds wrote: post #59
largepeepee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored. Many of Google's software eventually get worse too. YouTube for example has killed most of their social features by removing dislikes, limited searchability of videos by channel, allowed bots to fill the comments. And Google search has so much malware in their ads that pop up first, that even govts are recommending ad blockers by default.…

I had to delete the YouTube app simply because there was no way to disable Shorts. Those things are hopelessly addictive and unavoidable. If I wanted shorts, I'd install TikTok.

Shorts are displayed on one single line of the home and subscriptions tab. They’re trivially easy to avoid.
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