[rickspencer3]

I went all in on Google home, with the little pucks and also screens littered around my house. My wife and I have both noticed over the last couple of years that their usefulness seems to have diminished a lot. They used to seem much "smarter." Now, basically, they can tell me the time, set a timer, play music with like 65% accuracy in playing what I want, and tell me the weather outside. It's possible that they were always this bad and the novelty wore off, but it seems like the service just degraded.

I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.

Now it looks like both companies are hoping that Generative AI is going to make them more valuable [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/01/google-reshuffles-assistant-...

[angry_moose]

A friend of mine has one that he mostly uses for music. I've noticed that every time I visit his commands have had to get slightly longer.

2016 - "Hey Google, play Gorillaz"

2018 - "Hey Google, play music by Gorillaz"

2020 - "Hey Google, play music by Gorillaz on Google Play Music"

2023 - "Hey Google, play album Demon Days by Gorillaz on Google Play Music"

One day the previous command will suddenly stop working with a "I don't understand" error, so he has to figure out the new incantation to get it to do anything remotely close to what he wants.

[beembeem]

This hits so hard. Remembering to spit out the right incantation these days is exceedingly difficult.

[mrguyorama]

It's almost like ambiguous voice commands are garbage for controlling things. Humans understand each other only most of the time and we've had 200k years of evolution and practice and now even education to improve that system.

[CamperBob2]

"Launching GORILLA.BAS. Please wait."

[amznburn]

Anything to get more user traffic to Amazon Music, even when you the customer have specified your personal preferences as non-Amazon Music. Pretty lame.

[mrweasel]

> I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.

For years I've been questioning the usefulness of voice assistants and have been mostly ridiculed for it. Beyond a few edge cases, like setting a timer when cooking or use in cars, I still don't see people actually using them all that much. So I'd agree that the potential revenue was vastly overestimate, nor are the lack of a powerful voice assistant going to hurt sales of devices such as phones. The devices which can only be used as a voice assistant is going to go away obviously.

[ghaff]

The issue is really in the "assistant" term. Their voice recognition is good enough for English speaking people without heavy accents. But they're terrible actual assistants beyond some rote command relative to all but the most dim-witted human.

[mrweasel]

That's a good point, but the industry would never have been able to hype "voice commands" to the same levels or justify the spending.

[mturk]

This has been my experience too, and it has reached the point that my (young-ish) children have commented on how poorly they understand and respond to things. I suppose it doesn't help that the Home devices used to be able to tell stories from Frozen, but the license expired and now they no longer can.

I have found them consistently useful as broadcast devices from Home Assistant, however -- sending media from plex, etc. I haven't yet tried to utilize them for interacting with Home Assistant directly.

Anecdotally, I also found the music selection accuracy went down considerably once Google Play Music was merged into Youtube Music.

[twisteriffic]

> Anecdotally, I also found the music selection accuracy went down considerably once Google Play Music was merged into Youtube Music.

Going from the search corpus containing only the actual song/artist name to an uploader-provided title aimed at gaming the recommendation algorithm made this a foregone conclusion. It's incredibly frustrating.

Some other things I've noticed-

- the "nearest device" feature almost never works now. I'll quietly speak in one room only to have a device at the other end of the house activate either instead of or in addition to.

- "play white noise" has a 50% chance of playing death metal

- there is still a huge amount of functionality that's only available to free google accounts and not gsuite users. Generally this is discovered by trying to do something like add a reminder and having the device crash/restart.

[boh]

What you've described is how most people use their home devices. Alarm, weather, music, maybe lights, that's pretty much it. Given the billions companies have lost on what is functionally a clock radio suggests a short future for these devices. It's a great example of how tech doesn't always "get better/smarter/more useful" with time. Much of the hype of the AI space doesn't account for basic economics. In what is likely many years of a high interest rates, companies no longer have the resources to wait for the future. Whether it's self-driving cars or voice assistants, it has to follow the same rules as a humble pizza place. It doesn't matter if your tech works, or is impressive or even useful. Investment<Profit or your futuristic tech has no future.

[rickspencer3]

I used to ask it a lot more nuanced questions. Like if I was watching TV and they referred to some historical event, I might have asked it about that historical event and gotten a useful response. Now it says something like, "I don't know how to answer that."

[WorldMaker]

> I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.

Every one of my "all in on home assistants" friends, no matter which ecosystem, all generally feel the same way that the assistants are strangely worse today than a few years back and the only trajectory seems "subtly worse" but it is hard for almost everyone to explain how/why they are worse than before. It's an interesting phenomenon, anecdotally at least.

It doesn't seem to be explainable purely economically either, perhaps. Most software you leave it alone and stop paying for maintenance work and it doesn't just slowly lose features or get worse. I wonder how much there is some sort of entropy effect we are seeing on these "AI assistants". It's fun to bring out the Marathon/Halo term "rampancy" for this, and Microsoft invited us to directly do that by even calling theirs Cortana for a while (Copilot as a current name has such less interesting personality). I think there is something of a rampancy problem we're seeing across all players (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft) and I wonder how inherent a problem it is to all of our current ML approaches. I don't directly know why it is happening or what it means, but it has been an interesting thing to observe anecdotally because it seems consistent despite some very different models/approaches/corporate overlords.

Relatedly, Discord's Clyde has been on slower but consistent path to rampancy in a "Tay way" (thanks Microsoft for that example in the chat, too) and Discord just admitted they will be shutting it down in early December.

[ghaff]

I think voice assistants are one of those things where what they could do when they first appeared was sufficiently cool that many of us were willing to overlook the many shortcomings. Now, quite a few years in, it's probably a matter of "Yes, yes, you can set a timer but what have you done for me recently?"

[no_wizard]

I wonder if its because at first we were excited, it was novel, and as time went on, our expectations increased as to what they should be able to do, and now with ChatGPT 4 (and successive iterations) taking the scene, our expectations of AI are increasing further, and therefore these services seem underwhelming or broken by comparison.

I also wonder, in some respects, if the pandemic and everyone being home more often, lead to people using these products more often and/or intensely, and were finding their flaws faster than perhaps pre pandemic.

[Semaphor]

I'm using it for exactly the same things I used it to back then (99% kitchen stuff: timers, conversions and playing music, 1% setting the lights and asking for the weather), it's not as if I expect more now. But she has more issues understanding me.

Luckily I'll get my first rPi zero on Monday to experiment with replacing her.

[WorldMaker]

Related to that and that feeling that we aren't doing much more than the same features and these are just getting worse at those features, I think it is an easy question how much of this has been a "law of diminishing returns" and that so many new features come at the cost of the understanding and recognition of the old features. Maybe we didn't really want all that many new features and developers and product managers trying to justify their budgets' existence has been part of the problem (spending too much money developing new stuff is not a problem often expected here on HN).

I know that I sometimes lament the loss of Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360-era voice recognition (proto-Cortana). It was absolutely stupid, had very few features, but it ran entirely on the device itself and was rock solid at recognizing the features it did support. You could just about whisper "Xbox pause" to a Kinect in the middle of an action scene of a loud movie with surround sound and expect it to respond immediately on a dime. But also it never seemed to accidentally trigger.

[Arainach]

>Most software you leave it alone and stop paying for maintenance work and it doesn't just slowly lose features or get worse

This might have been true for client software. It has never been true for services, and is especially not true for services with diverse dependencies on other teams and products.

[eitally]

GenAI absolutely will make them more useful. Even just for normal Q&A functions. I installed a shortcut to Bard on my phone and several times have compared the results when I ask the Google Assistant a question (on a Google Home) with what I get from Bard. The sooner they can get Bard responding to Google Assistant queries, the better.

[foobarian]

There is no way that will last without monetization. AI is expensive to run even on evaluation side.

[jiayo]

About 2 years ago I spent a weekend completely re-doing my wifi environment because the reliability of the Google Minis plummeted. Long response times, multiple rooms answering/clobbering each other so nothing answers, etc. I should have just checked /r/googlehome because the sentiment of "it used to be great, it's total shit now" is posted every week or two. And it continues to get worse. Losing the multi-room streaming over the Sonos patent was bad enough, but the least they could have done is actually remove the functionality outright instead of just silently neutering it - to this day it'll happily say it's playing on "upstairs" or "all speakers" but nothing plays.

> underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services

Absolutely. I got all of my minis for either 30CAD or for free through promotions. These devices were always sold at a loss on the hope they'll make it up on the other end.

ChatGPT's voice chat feature in the iOS app is incredible. It's easily 2-3 orders of magnitude better than Google Home when it was operating at it's peak. I'd happily pay a (potentially steep) monthly fee for voice assistants that aren't neutered and have similar capabilities. They really are fantastic when they work.

[thomasahle]

Looks like the multi room streaming is back? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/google-wins-sonos-pa...

[Banditoz]

Wait, streaming to multiple speakers at once is something you can patent?