Introduction
Why does Google insist on making it’s assistant situation so bad?
In theory, assistant should be the best it’s ever been. It’s better at “understanding” what I ask for, and yet it less capable than ever to do so.
This post is a rant about my experience using modern assistants on Android, and why, while I used to use these features actively in the mid-to-late-2010s, I now don’t even bother with them.
The task
Back in the late 2010s, I used to be able to hold the home button and ask the Google Assistant to create an event based on this email. It would grab the context from my screen, and do exactly that. This has been impossible, as far as I can tell, to do for years now.
Trying to find the “right” assistant
At some point, my phone stopped responding to “OK Google”. I still don’t know why it won’t work.
Holding down the Home bar (the home button went the way of the dodo) brings up an assistant-style UI, but it’s dumb as bricks and only Googles the web. Useless.
So, I installed Gemini. I asked it to perform a basic task. It responded “in live mode, I cannot do that”. Asking it how I can get it to create me a calendar event, it could not answer the question. Saying instead to open my calendar app and create a new event. I know how to use a calendar. I want it to justify its existence by providing more value than a Google search. It was ultimately unable to answer the question.
Searching the internet, apparently both of the ways I had been using assistant features were the wrong way to do it. You have to hold down the power button, that’s how to launch the proper one. My internal response was:
No, that’s for the power menu. I don’t want to dedicate it to Assistant.
Well, apparently, that’s the only way to do it now, so there I go sacrificing another convenience turning it on.
Pulling teeth with Gemini
So I ask this power-menu-version of Gemini to do the same simple task. I tried 4 separate times.
First, it created a random event “Meeting with a client” on a completely different day (what?).
Second time it just crashed with an error.
The third time, it asked me which email to use, giving me a list, but that list did not contain the email I was interested in. I asked it to find the Royal Mail one. No success.
So, quite clearly, it wasn’t using screen content.
I rephrased the question: “Please create an event from the content on my screen”. It replied “Sure, when’s this for?”
I shouldn’t have to tell you. That’s the point. It’s right there.
Conclusion
There are too many damn assistant versions, and they are all bad. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to also have Bixby in the mix as a Samsung user. (Feel free to let me know below.)
It seems like none of them are able to pull context from what you are doing anymore, and you’ll spend more time fiddling and googling how to make them work than it would take for you to do the task yourself.
In some ways, assistants have gotten worst than almost 10 years ago, despite billions in investments.
As a little bonus, the internet is filled with AI slop that makes finding out real facts, real studies from real people harder than ever.
I write this all mostly to blow off steam, as this stuff has been frustrating me for years now. Let me know what your experience has been like below, I could use some camaraderie.
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
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.
Just so you know, your name’s visible in the “Gemini crashes” image.
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.
Have you heard of Homeassistant? It’s a self-hosted smart home solution that fills a lot of the gaps left by the most smart home tech. They’ve recently added and refined support for various different voice assistants, some of which run completely on your hardware. I have found they have great community support for this project and you can also buy their hardware if you don’t feel like tinkering on a Raspberry Pi or VM. The best thing (IMHO) about Homeassistant is that it is FOSS.
I got their voice widget, its slow and stupid.
Need to figure out how to connect it to a gpu
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.
That’s an optimistic view.
But really, that’s just Google being Google.
Even years before the “AI” hype their Assistant kept suddenly losing features that worked perfectly fine before.Just like Android loses features on every major version, and Maps is a skeleton of its former self.
In a company where nobody is incentivised to maintain anything, cutting features is the easier option.
Fortunately, you can just append the word “Reddit” to your Internet query and it’ll take you straight to the most helpful answer…
Well, shit:-(.
Stack overflow also had a similar situation causing people to strike.
Enshittification has ruined so much in the world of tech.
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.Idk about anyone else, but my struggles to even just execute the command to shut off a timer/alarm…
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’ve been doing a 90 day test of perplexity pro and so far it’s my front runner. They recently released an assistant that can launch in place of google assistants, it’s able to use screen context and interact with some apps, you can limit what info they collect, they don’t sell your data, and it connects to multiple models.
Have you heard of Ollama? It’s an LLM engine that you can run at home. The speed, model size, context length, etc. that you can achieve really depends on your hardware. I’m using a low-mid graphics card and 32GB of RAM and get decent performance. Not lightning quick like ChatGPT but fine for simple tasks.
Hmmm I couldn’t really find anything. The only way to guarantee that is to have models that run purely locally, but until very recently that wasn’t feasible.
Smaller AI models that could ruin a phone are now doable, but making them useful requires a lot of dev time and only giant data-guzzling companies have tried so far.
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 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.
4 times once every few years is still way lower than using it every few weeks, once, as it works the first time.
I didn’t say that it was a valid KPI 😇
because in order to make it kind of work, you have to enable the settings that record all your data
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.
