[napoleoncomplex]

A lot of the changes just don't make any sense? Some of the features removed:

- Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages - Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event. - Asking to take certain actions by voice, such as send a payment, make a reservation, or post to social media. You can still ask Assistant to open your installed apps. - Asking to meditate with Calm. You can still ask for meditation options with media providers such as YouTube.

All of these seem to fall under the umbrella of "features that actually make the assistant an assistant"/connecting the assistant to other apps, which I imagine is exactly the opposite of where the Assistant trend is going, especially with LLMs. Just speaking to a device about which action you want to take and not needing to think which app you need to open and navigate feels like the UX of the future, whatever this is seems like the opposite.

[jpcfl]

My guess is that a lot of these features are hard-coded, and they are deprecating them in order to replace them with a more generic LLM-based assistant.

[aquova]

And despite how bullish everyone seems to be on LLMs, I suspect we'll see those very same LLM features get ripped out within 5 years or so.

[alejo]

If this was the case, wouldn’t had been better to axe these features once they were ready to roll out the new LLM-based functionality?

[hughesjj]

No you see, this way they can't easily roll back if the LLM functionality sucks and that's somehow better

[tlogan]

Perhaps, but it seems like a strange approach. I would assume they would retain these features and then gradually replace each one with an LLM-based approach.

[talleyrand]

I really hope that this is the case.

[matt_heimer]

They are probably statistically some of the lesser used features and since there were layoffs in Assistant ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947224 ) they are probably looking to shrink the codebase being maintained.

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.

[esafak]

Just because an LLM can better parse what you're saying it does not mean the business logic to act on it exists. The feature discoverability and churn problem will still exist.

[wvenable]

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.

[esafak]

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?

[aussieguy1234]

So, a programmer with LLM knowledge will have a startup idea to wrap all of this up in a nice little app. You say "turn on the lights", the app passes that to the LLM.

The LLM, having been pre trained on what to do, calls the API to turn on the lights.

[wvenable]

Ah I see what you mean.

[ActionHank]

So they can sell you the AI assistant subscription that will be out later this year.

[iudqnolq]

I think most of those features reply with hard coded UI elements rather than replying with generic text.