I have an android phone which means I use android auto fairly often. The sheer quality destruction it's experienced since transitioning to Gemini is incredible.
I experience this mostly when asking for music. Before gemini, mistakes were common but deterministic. It was easy to understand where the query had gone wrong and so how to fix it. Example:
"Hey google, play Blackstar"
(Plays the album blackstar by David Bowie, not what I wanted)
"Hey google, play "Blackstar by Radiohead"
(Plays the right thing).
Now:
"Hey Google, play Blackstar by Radiohead" can result in playing... something vaguely semantically related with no way to course correct. In this exact instance (happened yesterday!) it played an album by the hip hop due Black Star.
I will admit that there are some superpowers hidden in Gemini that were not present in the previous AI assistant. I recently discovered that Gemini can manipulate the navigation app, and a prompt like "Mute alerts" works, which is kind of cool. However like OP said, it's incredibly verbose, which is super annoying.
elAhmo 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
bsimpson 27 minutes ago [-]
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 ships. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually want them for.
Xeoncross 3 minutes ago [-]
Considering the decade of poor results from doing anything other than music, weather and alarms I think we've all learned to avoid using them for anything else.
themythfable 39 minutes ago [-]
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
jimbokun 28 minutes ago [-]
Like being the one who brought the dog home from the shelter and feeds it, and the dog still prefers your partner.
jimbokun 29 minutes ago [-]
Soon it will be like Jack Black in High Fidelity, preventing you from listening to music that’s currently too hip for you.
delichon 20 minutes ago [-]
I would be limited to Lawrence Welk.
RobRivera 45 minutes ago [-]
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)
daveshistory 37 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps Gemini's been training on sources too young to listen to Radiohead.
21 minutes ago [-]
Hugsbox 47 minutes ago [-]
I Fired theartofdoingstuff.com for extremely obnoxious ads - particularly the "Would you like to save this stuff?" one that greys out the rest of the article you're trying to read to... checks notes... ask if you want the article emailed to you? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
9dev 22 minutes ago [-]
Why would you even browse the web without using an ad blocker?
Hugsbox 14 minutes ago [-]
The "ad" as described in my comment isn't really an ad in the typical sense, it's baked into the website. But the real reason is, I'm on my work computer and unable to install browser extensions.
xnx 13 minutes ago [-]
No good options on Android right now. You can use Firefox, but there are a lot of tradeoffs.
radiorental 5 minutes ago [-]
I'm curious what the tradeoffs are, I exclusively use FF and any time Chrome auto opens via a link I immediately baulk at the experience.
sqquima 37 minutes ago [-]
And a clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted post.
tomasphan 34 minutes ago [-]
It’s not clear to me. What makes you sure it’s AI assisted?
shaky-carrousel 29 minutes ago [-]
> Google Home used to be one of my favourite gadgets.
> Not because it was smart.
> Because it was useful.
I was half expecting "and that's bold" after that.
deafpolygon 20 minutes ago [-]
It might be quietly bold in a world of stunning declarations.
warpfactor 15 minutes ago [-]
and load bearing
input_sh 36 minutes ago [-]
I promise you that she went through the effort of putting less ads than what Adsense does by default.
intrasight 38 minutes ago [-]
It is ironic that so many articles calling out enshittification are themselves examples of the same.
pwython 34 minutes ago [-]
I had Claude whip up a local solution for me using Gemma 4 26b-a4b on my Mac and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It can do web search (valyu), file reading -- I have business & personal context stored in many markdown files -- weather, Apple reminders, and has cross-session memory. Streamline but capable agent that has been pieced together over a few weeks after using Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern, with bits of Hermes logic. Orpheus-TTS streams the spoken reply back with the first word usually landing in half a second. Voice input is openWakeWord for the wake word plus faster-whisper for speech-to-text, all on-device. I can run it straight on the Mac but I use it with the pi satellite and a cheap USB speakerphone (ConfCall MS13B). You can barge in by just talking over it rather than having to say the wake word again. Pretty handy Google Home replacement.
ravetcofx 32 minutes ago [-]
Do you have a GitHub or something for the project? Sounds lovely.
pwython 27 minutes ago [-]
Not yet, I have to decouple some of the specific/personal logic. When I do push it, it'll be here: https://github.com/alisorcorp
jimbokun 25 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like you could have a successful product.
itodd 55 minutes ago [-]
> Then I went directly to Amazon and ordered an Alexa.
Dear lord.
psanford 37 minutes ago [-]
I got rid of my Alexa devices after they would not shut up. "Alexa what is the weather for today?" "The weather for today will be ... By the way, did you know that you can set alarms? Just say ..."
I do not care about whatever stupid feature you want to build engagement around. Do what I asked you to do and then shut up.
And don't get me started on the Alexa Show that had the audacity to display ads.
jorts 15 minutes ago [-]
I threw all my Alexa devices away due to that as well.
goopthink 47 minutes ago [-]
> I ordered it because when one superpower fails you, eventually you have to try the other one before they eventually ruin the thing that was working perfectly well before they tried to improve it in order to make enough money to be a trio of planets.
When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”
reilly3000 52 minutes ago [-]
She sounds addicted to toxic relationships.
kwanbix 37 minutes ago [-]
I sadly did the same as I didn't know best. The Google speakers started to have issues identifying the orders, so we bought some alexas, which we also use as speakers for our tvs.
Do you have a better recommendation of a smart speaker that can play spotify, youtube music, or tidal?
nativeit 48 minutes ago [-]
Well, now when she wants to know the symptoms of dehydration, she can purchase some sort of Gatorade really convenient like.
daveguy 39 minutes ago [-]
And how about this:
> The closest I could get to punching Google in the ear and ripping out its nose hairs.
As if giving more money to another shitty megacorp for another frustrating device is going to make any difference to the first shitty megacorp.
krabizzwainch 13 minutes ago [-]
I think that this is a really good article for a reason that none of us are mentioning. This is not a tech blog saying this. This is a cooking/gardening/home blog. I use these terms jokingly, but we are nerds on hacker news and this blog writer is a normie. Regular people are getting fed up with how bad google is getting, not just the nerds.
Companies don't care when nerds complain. We always complain. But when their normal user base starts jumping ship, then they could very well start listening.
chymerax 44 minutes ago [-]
The whole upgrade thing is stupid. For years I was able to tell my phone in the car: "Play this song on spotify" and it did it. Not any more.
"Ok google! Set a timer for 20 minutes." -> "Sorry Bob, I don't have permission to do that".
"Ok google, navigate home" -> "Navigating to Store@Home24!" (half a country away).
I agree. I wasn't smart but it was useful in certain cases. Now it's just lobotomized.
cmoski 55 seconds ago [-]
and it takes sooooo looooong to write a text message with your voice now.
data-ottawa 30 minutes ago [-]
> For years I could ask Google what song was playing and it would identify it. It was one of the most useful features it had. You'd hear a song in a store, on television or drifting over from a neighbour's backyard and Google would identify it in seconds.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when I’m in the car and want to know what song is playing on the radio. I run Shazam and my phone mutes the stereo to activate a microphone. I have to disconnect from CarPlay then run Shazam, then reconnect — it’s a passenger only operation.
Song recognition is built into both iOS and Android, the device should always use the internal mic instead of a CarPlay/Android Auto microphone over Bluetooth.
Side note: is there a good “dumb smart speaker” I can have run with a wake word connected to my own API? Speech to Text and Speech to Speech are fairly well supported for local AI workflows now, it would be great to have my own Home device without worrying about where the audio goes.
I’m sure it’s a very niche audience today, but I imagine giving this thing MCP for Wikipedia, a music app, and my recipes would be perfect.
Hard_Space 32 minutes ago [-]
This is a chronic LLM style, particularly the multipart dramatic flourishes and the Haiku paragraphs. But at this stage, there's a good chance that LLM re-diffusion of this style is feeding back into human culture. God save us.
giancarlostoro 23 minutes ago [-]
> Nobody asked for New Coke.
I know nobody did, but seeing as I was too young (and maybe not even alive?) I have always wanted to try it. I'm a Coca Cola enthusiast after all. I wish they'd release a "Throwback Experimental Coke" batch out. I assume it was their attempt to flavor coke without the coca leaves?
fastforwardius 15 minutes ago [-]
Good to stop repeating actions making you unhappy, but how about going without assistants alltogether?
From the examples given I haven't seen any meaningful life improvement with them.
orn 50 minutes ago [-]
And her site spams you with soo many ads, I had to shut it down
loloquwowndueo 50 minutes ago [-]
Hey now you know how she paid for all those home assistant gimmicks.
rogerrogerr 51 minutes ago [-]
This would be great if it wasn't written so breathlessly.
philipallstar 39 minutes ago [-]
> I don't need a four-minute explanation. I don't need context. I don't need a balanced discussion that considers multiple viewpoints and concludes with a summary.
Karen, you mean you don't want those things. Stop confusing want and need.
- The Manager.
jimbokun 31 minutes ago [-]
Fun article, but the sea of pop ups and advertisements battling to distract you from the text ironically exemplifies the point being made about Google Home.
speak_plainly 41 minutes ago [-]
The quality of Gemini varies so much throughout the day, the week and the month that it’s hard to rely on it for anything. It feels like Google is trying to throttle costs but has completely missed the mark.
aliasxneo 51 minutes ago [-]
I don't really use our Google Home devices, but my wife does. Ever since the "update" I've noticed now that Gemini likes to ask her 2-3 follow up questions after each query. The first might be something like, "Would you like to know more about <X>?" My wife would answer "No" and Gemini would respond like, "Is there anything else you would like to discuss on the subject of <X>?" It's gotten to the point where she will start yelling "cancel" and "stop" to get it to shut up.
delichon 40 minutes ago [-]
I talk to chatbots while doing yardwork, often with both hands full. Yesterday I tried to get it to shut up mid conversation and just could not do it with voice only. I had to wait through several minutes of blathering, restarted by every random noise, before I could put the chainsaw down and turn it off.
I was amazed at my own level of anger at that. It was just a voice in my ears but I reacted to it viscerally like it was an assault. It didn't help that it was in the middle of a sequence of it telling one lie after another, like "yes, I can disconnect this conversation." Maybe what I had is a natural reaction to having a lying clueless asshole refuse to go away or shut up, which I haven't otherwise had to deal with lately.
dminik 32 minutes ago [-]
This is kind of funny, but very much expected.
The interface into the LLM is tokens in and out (text, images, audio). And the harness generally doesn't understand what you're passing in. The LLM has nothing to do other than to respond with tokens and empty responses (eg. just a stop token) have been aggressively trained out of it.
bighead1 42 minutes ago [-]
> Nobody asked for cars that require IT support and 3 sub-menus to lower the air conditioning. (Screens are cheaper to install than buttons and knobs.)
perhaps, but people did ask for cheaper cars.
neogodless 19 minutes ago [-]
This doesn't really track. Sibling comment pointed out that the average new car transaction price is massively higher than before knobs were replaced with screens.
But more importantly... screens were put in more expensive cars first, and slowly trickled down to budget cars. It's a very weak argument that it was done for cost reasons. Screens are flashy and impress people during their 5 minute test drive. "Wow! Think of all the things I can do in my car that I couldn't do with a knob for changing fan speed." Sure, living with those screens tends to be a bit less enjoyable than those first impressions lead you to believe, but bright colorful animated screens helped to sell cars. If they're actually less expensive than knobs and buttons, that's just a bonus for the manufacturers.
Also keep in mind, when screens first appeared in (expensive) cars, they weren't actually cheaper than the knobs and buttons they replaced. Technology is, sorry was getting cheaper per unit of performance over time. Screens became commonplace and inexpensive to put in cars, but I suspect they were ten times more expensive than all the knobs and levers they replaced when they started appearing in luxury cars.
fastforwardius 29 minutes ago [-]
I saw cost savings trickle down to customers only in an economy textbook.
mrhottakes 33 minutes ago [-]
Did they? No one buys cheap new cars, at least in the US.
csunbird 37 minutes ago [-]
and we ended up with new cars being 2x expensive even after adjusting with inflation somehow
runarberg 37 minutes ago [-]
But nobody got cheaper cars. The shareholders on the other hand asked for a third yacht, and they got exactly what they wanted (after the car manufacturer fired the team which used to do usability testing for their interface)
hylaride 48 minutes ago [-]
The only things these "smart" speakers are good for is timers, adding to lists (especially grocery lists in the kitchen), and playing music. And even then they often stutter...
francisofascii 40 minutes ago [-]
Agree, but they are very good at playing music. They are still useful even if the don't do anything else, just like a microwave just needs to cook food.
mrhottakes 32 minutes ago [-]
They can't do any of those three things anymore
adithyassekhar 27 minutes ago [-]
> Award winning actress Geena Davis is 70 years old.
Thank you!
markbnj 28 minutes ago [-]
I feel like the author has another disappointment coming. Alexa has been annoying in this way for a long time now. Still very useful as well, but yeah, annoying. It has always been too proactive about suggesting things I don't want or need in response to simple questions like "What is the outside temperature?" ("It's currently 46 degrees, with a low of 32 degrees expected overnight. Did you know you can turn your lights on and off according to a schedule? Would you like to schedule turning some lights on or off?") But recent AI-oriented updates have just made it worse. Now its chatty and full of attitude, and having raised a few teenagers let me tell you, that's what we want more of in our lives. Chat. And attitude.
VBprogrammer 33 minutes ago [-]
I wondered how long it would be until someone took the obvious step of wiring a voice assistant up to a full blown LLM model. Seems like the thing I failed to consider was whether that was actually a good idea.
deafpolygon 21 minutes ago [-]
“An adblocker is preventing this page from loading.”
No…, you are.
freediddy 50 minutes ago [-]
Sorry but this page and site have the most obnoxious number of ads on almost any page I've ever seen. After reading a couple of paragraphs I closed the window, no content is worth subjecting myself to that many ads and trying to navigate which is real content and which isn't.
cwnyth 40 minutes ago [-]
Firefox + ublock origin and voilà, no more ads.
krabizzwainch 17 minutes ago [-]
Don't forget a pihole! Sometimes I really do forget how obnoxious the internet is until I try to look at a website when I'm outside of my ad free setup at home. Which in a way keeps me from browsing around websites on my phone and wasting time in that way.
mrhottakes 31 minutes ago [-]
I can't fathom how anyone uses the web without an ad blocker these days. Especially shocking to hear on HN.
fiatjaf 37 minutes ago [-]
Apparently you haven't fired Cloudflare, since this website forces me to go through a captcha in order to read (and I'm not even using a VPN or Tor).
trimethylpurine 39 minutes ago [-]
Hey Google, write an article called "I Fired Google."
(Although, based on the tone, I think it's Grok.)
complianceowll 57 minutes ago [-]
This was so spot on I felt like standing up and yelling, "Yes! Exactly!"
ncr100 43 minutes ago [-]
I have a similar experience.
Having used Google home assistant since it came out for all the things that it's good for, and watched its quality fluctuate, I find I really have to be more careful nowadays when I ask it questions because it can go overboard more easily.
Is there a term in AI research where it underappreciates the specificity that is being asked for?
Perhaps the AI could be default prompted, "you are a kitchen AI assistant and should tend to answer in facts and details and that are relevant to the current moment."
nyeah 40 minutes ago [-]
They've spent a lot of money on this technology, and what users want is just not that high a priority.
43 minutes ago [-]
pipeline_peak 42 minutes ago [-]
Never understood why anyone would use Google Home or Amazon Echo when we all have phones.
A DSLR camera is better than a phones camera, a voice assisting device seems replaceable however.
basisword 51 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand how anyone bothers with these things. Other than timers in the kitchen (where hands might be greasy) I've always found it faster to just pull out my phone and Google it.
P.S. I hope that dehydration/headaches question was a poorly chosen example and not something someone over the age of 5 seriously needs an answer to.
I experience this mostly when asking for music. Before gemini, mistakes were common but deterministic. It was easy to understand where the query had gone wrong and so how to fix it. Example:
"Hey google, play Blackstar"
(Plays the album blackstar by David Bowie, not what I wanted)
"Hey google, play "Blackstar by Radiohead"
(Plays the right thing).
Now:
"Hey Google, play Blackstar by Radiohead" can result in playing... something vaguely semantically related with no way to course correct. In this exact instance (happened yesterday!) it played an album by the hip hop due Black Star.
I will admit that there are some superpowers hidden in Gemini that were not present in the previous AI assistant. I recently discovered that Gemini can manipulate the navigation app, and a prompt like "Mute alerts" works, which is kind of cool. However like OP said, it's incredibly verbose, which is super annoying.
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 ships. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually want them for.
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
> Not because it was smart.
> Because it was useful.
I was half expecting "and that's bold" after that.
Dear lord.
I do not care about whatever stupid feature you want to build engagement around. Do what I asked you to do and then shut up.
And don't get me started on the Alexa Show that had the audacity to display ads.
When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”
Do you have a better recommendation of a smart speaker that can play spotify, youtube music, or tidal?
> The closest I could get to punching Google in the ear and ripping out its nose hairs.
As if giving more money to another shitty megacorp for another frustrating device is going to make any difference to the first shitty megacorp.
Companies don't care when nerds complain. We always complain. But when their normal user base starts jumping ship, then they could very well start listening.
I agree. I wasn't smart but it was useful in certain cases. Now it's just lobotomized.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when I’m in the car and want to know what song is playing on the radio. I run Shazam and my phone mutes the stereo to activate a microphone. I have to disconnect from CarPlay then run Shazam, then reconnect — it’s a passenger only operation.
Song recognition is built into both iOS and Android, the device should always use the internal mic instead of a CarPlay/Android Auto microphone over Bluetooth.
Side note: is there a good “dumb smart speaker” I can have run with a wake word connected to my own API? Speech to Text and Speech to Speech are fairly well supported for local AI workflows now, it would be great to have my own Home device without worrying about where the audio goes.
I’m sure it’s a very niche audience today, but I imagine giving this thing MCP for Wikipedia, a music app, and my recipes would be perfect.
I know nobody did, but seeing as I was too young (and maybe not even alive?) I have always wanted to try it. I'm a Coca Cola enthusiast after all. I wish they'd release a "Throwback Experimental Coke" batch out. I assume it was their attempt to flavor coke without the coca leaves?
From the examples given I haven't seen any meaningful life improvement with them.
Karen, you mean you don't want those things. Stop confusing want and need.
- The Manager.
I was amazed at my own level of anger at that. It was just a voice in my ears but I reacted to it viscerally like it was an assault. It didn't help that it was in the middle of a sequence of it telling one lie after another, like "yes, I can disconnect this conversation." Maybe what I had is a natural reaction to having a lying clueless asshole refuse to go away or shut up, which I haven't otherwise had to deal with lately.
The interface into the LLM is tokens in and out (text, images, audio). And the harness generally doesn't understand what you're passing in. The LLM has nothing to do other than to respond with tokens and empty responses (eg. just a stop token) have been aggressively trained out of it.
perhaps, but people did ask for cheaper cars.
But more importantly... screens were put in more expensive cars first, and slowly trickled down to budget cars. It's a very weak argument that it was done for cost reasons. Screens are flashy and impress people during their 5 minute test drive. "Wow! Think of all the things I can do in my car that I couldn't do with a knob for changing fan speed." Sure, living with those screens tends to be a bit less enjoyable than those first impressions lead you to believe, but bright colorful animated screens helped to sell cars. If they're actually less expensive than knobs and buttons, that's just a bonus for the manufacturers.
Also keep in mind, when screens first appeared in (expensive) cars, they weren't actually cheaper than the knobs and buttons they replaced. Technology is, sorry was getting cheaper per unit of performance over time. Screens became commonplace and inexpensive to put in cars, but I suspect they were ten times more expensive than all the knobs and levers they replaced when they started appearing in luxury cars.
Thank you!
No…, you are.
(Although, based on the tone, I think it's Grok.)
Having used Google home assistant since it came out for all the things that it's good for, and watched its quality fluctuate, I find I really have to be more careful nowadays when I ask it questions because it can go overboard more easily.
Is there a term in AI research where it underappreciates the specificity that is being asked for?
Perhaps the AI could be default prompted, "you are a kitchen AI assistant and should tend to answer in facts and details and that are relevant to the current moment."
A DSLR camera is better than a phones camera, a voice assisting device seems replaceable however.
P.S. I hope that dehydration/headaches question was a poorly chosen example and not something someone over the age of 5 seriously needs an answer to.
Related from the last month:
Google changes its search box
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
Google Declaring War on the Web
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449
Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266051
Google Hates You
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313538
You can no longer Google the word 'disregard'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238351
The IBM-ification of Google?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230049
https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-e...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...
They rolled it back though afaik because the whole idea was a comically evil idea.