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In the future, Google Assistant can only be used for activities which can be monetized with ads.
Ah I love when they remove features to improve my experience
The chocolate ration has been raised to 7 grams per day.
I disabled it on my phones. I've found it to be completely without value.
I'll probably switch to ChatGPT or something when they enable the feature to use it as a digital assistant.
I only use it to set reminders. Are they killing that too?
Don't tell them!
I tried to use it for reminders, like "remind me about the laundry in one hour", only to realize a few hours later that I forgot about the laundry. The reminder never appeared. Asking "where is my reminder, google?" didn't help.
They're removing a bunch of features that nobody wanted.
They could kill the rest and my experience would be improved even further.
Google killing more features like this makes me absolutely certain that they have no fucking idea what they're doing over there.
But this isn't a shock; they've been dumbing down the "Assistant" by slowly removing useful features ever since Siri pulled down the Assistant's Google colored skirts and panties and spanked it with her capabilities. Heck even Alexa joined in on the hazing, smiling smugly as she accumulates ability after ability, and being a literal voice powered "Buy it now!~" button.
I haven't used Google Assistant since like Android 7; where they were STILL removing features and adding more useless ones. Genuinely I can't understand why the layoffs had to cause these reductions in functionality unless they were also hiring 3rd world Mechanical Turks to transcribe and do all the work.
Even more frustrating is that the Assistant hasn't changed much besides bleeding off features every year, when they could've been working to correctly integrate AI into the Assistant, which would've made her 1000x more intelligent and useful.
I still remember how unhelpful Assistant is if you don't give her exactly the right command with exactly the right wording. Unlike Siri or Alexa, there's absolutely minimal effort to ensure smooth Natural Language Processing happens when it benefits the user.
It's curious to me if they could have deprecated and refused to support these features rather than take them out. They might run until they don't, ya know? When they did this last year and removed "let's play a game" my kid was pretty bummed that we couldn't have game show games on road trips anymore. I'm sure these things may disappoint some people.
When this happens it's often because a backend component gets rewritten and somebody decides that it's too much work to re-implement some features for the new backend. It's much easier to come up with a PR spiel for why removing the features is actually a good thing.
A bunch of stuff that's both convenient and mostly not a huge amount of complexity on the development side. Nice.
When Google Assistant first launched it couldn't do anything, not even basic arithmetic, without App & Search History enabled in you Google account. So I never used it and now I forget it exists.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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