Before:

     "Hey Google, call my wife"

                           ------> Immediately calls wife

     "Hey Google, call my wife"

                           --50%-> "Is that XXXXXX?"

                           --25%-> Immediately calls wife

                           --20%-> "I'm sorry, I couldn't find a contact saved as 'wife'" 

                           --05%-> Immediately calls someone different from my wife

There was an Amazon UXR study that floated around ~8 years ago that said the only things people care about from a voice assistant are music, weather, and alarms.

PMs keep trying to make them "smarter," and it just makes the core user journeys worse.

Surely they think they're inventing cars when we're griping about buggy whips. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually want them for.

I don't really use Google products except Youtube, but their auto-subtitler (closed captions) have really taken a weird turn lately. It used to try sounding out the words so even if it didn't pick the right word, it was at least close to right one. But now it substitutes entire phrases and sentences based on what is most likely to appear in a conversation even if it has no bearing or similarities to what was said.

I feel like the song suggestions also vary depending on the music service. For example the other day, "Play cicada by Igor" got me Cicadidae by Igorrr on YT Music (this is what I wanted), but got me Igor's Theme by Tyler the Creator. ???? So I tried "Play cicadidae by I-G-O-R-R-R" and I got Cicada by Good Kid.

That said I feel like no matter the music service it's a 50/50 shot each time if it plays the song I want. No matter how many times before I've played it or asked for it.

The latest Gemini update for Android Auto also absolutely ruined the voice control for Waze. It was already bad, but now Android Auto is basically unusable by voice.

Same thing with Google homes.

Pre-gemini, you knew what you would get, basically the structured snippets that would appear at the top of the search results.

Now it's much more verbose.

My biggest gripe is that it basically stopped listening to me, since "upgrading" to Gemini, which is frustrating because I've used it to control the Hue lights for the past decade.

It listens to my partner though, so after it fails to listen to me, I have to ask her to ask Google to adjust the fing lights.

Welp

We are solidly in the Nutri-Matic phase of AI deployment. I fear we may never leave.

Even before the move to Gemini they've been on a downward spiral, 'skills' Google home used to have now don't work and it feels like they've been actively making it worse. I've not switched to Gemini yet but now I'm not too hopeful.

Since android auto transitioned to Gemini, whenever I try to reply to a message by tapping the reply button, it now states "Sorry, but to do that, you'll need permission from your Google Workspace administrator." The stupid part is, if I listen to the message first, then say yes when it asks me if I'd like to reply, I'm then allowed to reply. There's countless articles and posts about this but no one seems to have found a reliable solution yet. Has been going on since at least December.

It also now seems to trigger its own barge-in about 50% of the time. It'll start reading the first syllable of a message, apparently confuse itself talking for me saying something, then just follow that with silence "listening" for my response until I physically have to hit the back button on the car.

Perhaps Gemini's been training on sources too young to listen to Radiohead.

Similarly, Siri was arguably better a decade ago when it has deterministic intents that you could trigger with certainty, now it is all seemingly random at time.

I wonder how much of it is them trying to minmax their revenue generating marketing algos for content discovery. (Willing to bet it's somewhat relative)

Soon it will be like Jack Black in High Fidelity, preventing you from listening to music that’s currently too hip for you.