[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.