Changes we're making to Google Assistant

This seems to imply that apps which feature 'app actions' would no longer work properly and will need to be opened via assistant separately...

Sounds like a major regression for those scenarios with needing to issue a separate command to open an app.

Assistant has trained our household into thinking that its pretty limited in what it can do so everyone in our home only uses it for basic things. Since Google's assistant can't accomplish more than most basic tasks people don't use more than the basic tasks. No one wants to learn the appropriate subset of English to speak the Google assistant dialect. You really need the voice assistants to be reliable and basic or extremely capable. There is no real middle ground here for most users.

Hopefully once LLMs get more integrated with voice assistants we will move more towards the extremely capable side of the spectrum.

1. I can see how this is absolutely frustrating for someone who uses one of these commands regularly.

2. At the same time, one of the issues with voice commands relative to say keyboard input is the lack of delineation. If I hit Ctrl + Enter on my keyboard, there's no way for the computer to interpret that any differently. However, that's not the case with voice commands. It needs to keep determining (a) what I said, (b) whether it's a command or just voice, (c) whether it's a command it's supposed to execute and that's before it even figures out waht to execute. But the problem is that as the number of voice commands increases, the number of false "this is a command and not just voice" triggers will increase.

There's probably a genuine benefit for Google's users in the universe of commands being very small as long as the command that's removed is not one they use.

I've noticed several of the options are "you can use a custom routine to do this instead". Maybe Google should have included the custom routine and made it togglable.

I've already decided that I'm done with Google's smart assistant stuff in any case. I have a Google Home with a screen in my kitchen and the most-used feature (aside from just existing as a photo frame) was an integration with a really useful shopping list app called AnyList. It certainly wasn't complex, we'd say "Hey Google, add to the shopping list" and it would do it. But it was very useful: I'd have something in my hands I just pulled from the fridge (e.g. milk) and be able to add it to the list without interrupting what I'm doing. If it had to wait until I was done for me to pull out my phone I'd inevitably forget.

Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides (which naturally has way fewer features than AnyList). They've never provided even the remotest defense for why they've removed it, it's very obviously to lock us into the Google ecosystem. So our Google Home is now a glorified photo frame that plays music from time to time (and even then prioritizes cover versions and YouTube videos over actual songs, presumably because $$$)