231–240 of 302 posts
I went home from that interview and threw my Google Home device in the trash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just faster to say "OK Google, navigate to work" than pulling out a keyboard and opening apps. Even though for some reason I still can't time when Google is going to start listening after all these years, and have to repeat myself a lot. I think it was fine-tuned for American voices at first and got worse when expanded worldwide.
why don't you know the way to work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feature already exists for LLM's -- you can provide them with the list of actions that it can do. This is how you integrate with an API. You describe your "turn on the lights" endpoint and so when you say "I need a bit more light" and it knows it can do something about it.
The users of LLM-based products don't know that; its programmers do. And what happens when an integration is added or removed; how is the user supposed to know?
To me this highlights the core failure with all these voice-driven UIs: you have absolutely no idea what is possible and what isn't. Discoverability is zero, which makes big changes like this even more disruptive. 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…
Every single one of those things have been deprecated and removed for… reasons?
All we can do with the speaker now is ask it to play music, get the weather, or set a timer.
Another step in Android's steady progression of become less and less useful hands-free. It's incredible to me that my experience with my Nexus One in 2010 was better than it is today with a Pixel 7. The fact that it arbitrarily decides to not recognize some contacts on some days. The fact that it can't handle me spelling out a street name when it insists on replacing the street name that I'm saying with something com…
Mine decided to helpfully alert me that there were three birthdays on January 1st, because it had somehow reset some contacts' birthdays to Jan 1, 1970. Except when I went to check the Contacts to fix them, they had no birthday at all. Death by a thousand cuts.
I read the title of this and thought - yes - at last - Google are going to be integrating LLM capabilities with Google Assistant to make it really really useful instead of occasionally useful with a side helping of frustration at how little it understands. Instead this seems to be a list of useful features that are being taken away! I'm disappointed. Google employ some of the best AI/ML engineers in the world and the…
Was announced in October, but haven't seen anything about it since.
I once interviewed someone working in the Google Assistant org. His job was to build technology that would detect "unusual sounds" that the microphone picks up while awaiting a "Hey Google" prompt. I went home from that interview and threw my Google Home device in the trash.
dog barking, baby crying, snoring, glass shattering, smoke alarm beeping, co2 alarm beeping, appliance beeping, running water
To me this highlights the core failure with all these voice-driven UIs: you have absolutely no idea what is possible and what isn't. Discoverability is zero, which makes big changes like this even more disruptive. 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…
If I recall correctly, "add to my list" originally went to shoppinglist.google.com. They rolled it into Keep[1] ("note to self," tags, sharing).
It works well. However...
In 2016, I figured "tell me showtimes for $MOVIE in $CITY" should work. It still doesn't work. It may never work, because "robot butler with ads" is no one's idea of the future. (Maybe Jeff.)
A fire-and-forget voice action like "add to list" should still work(?). For conversations[2], we can pray Gemini is less infuriating.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [2] https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset
For all the hype "AI" gets these days, it's amazing how much things have regressed. My Android phone used to remember where I parked and show it on my Google Now feed and a push notification as I headed out, all without ever asking it to do anything. The travel.google.com site used to show my itineraries without ever adding them there. Hotels, flights, car rentals, and more would be aggregated. Doesn't do that anymor…