- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- technology@lemmit.online
Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant::Up to 20 employees working on Google’s Assistant team have been cut.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. But would you like to hear why employees working on its voice assistant are being laid off by Google?
I’m about to throw my google speakers away at this point. I feel like they are becoming more and more useless. Voice commands used to work fine, but lately this is a standard occurance.
“Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights.”
“I’m sorry. It looks like that device hasn’t been set up yet.”
“Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights.”
“Power controls are not available at this time.”
“Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights”
…lights turn on…
Alexa is the same and used to work fine. My favorite is “Alexa, turn on the fan” turns on the fan in my mother’s room but “Alexa, turn off the fan”correctly turns off the fan in my bedroom. I ended up getting a HomePod and using home assistant to add all my devices to HomeKit. Shit on Siri all you want but at least she can turn the right devices on and off and on first try.
The enshittification will continue until quarterly profits improve…
…then they will continue to continue.
I unplugged mine a few weeks ago. I realized literally the only thing I use it for is occasionally finding my phone… besides that, it fucks up basically every instruction I give it
It works reasonably well for timers, alarms and weather.
Mine is a glorified kitchen timer that occasionally plays Spotify while I do dishes.
Except that it ALWAYS continues to listen after the command and you have to yell at it to fuck off.
Oh really? I can no longer get it to set a recurring alarm every monday through thursday. It’s just not understanding any of the commands there that it did before.
same. throwing out my speakers as they understand less each day as it feels. now its only a clap light switch and everything else, i at least have to ask 2 times
I’ve never before been so glad to read about someone else’s misfortune. Mine have been doing this for MONTHS and I thought it was just me imagining things
Unplugged mine last week. Fuck em.
Honestly, I pretty much only use mine for relatively cheap home speaker groups.
Every time I hear about some proprietary thing getting effectively bricked by the company that sold them so they don’t have to support them forever, I wonder “what did you think was going to happen?”