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by mturk 943 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.