Home Assistants getting dumber?

rangor gubbins said:
I thought it was possible to do voice control with HA, but I've never tried it. I've been using HA for a while but just simple stuff, mainly for logging and viewing data.
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Even if HA does it - there's the issue of how you get a microphone, CPU and speaker into the right locations. The Google Home/Nest products are cheap but relatively good quality so getting some third party, open source speaker of equal quality in ~6 locations in my home won't be cheap.

That is my next goal though - to source something that will be supported and improved upon by the FOSS community rather than slowly dumbed down by superceding products. I just don't think HA is there yet.
 
Ive had a google home/nest set up for 4+ years now and i do feel its getting dumber.
I have 7 different speaker/mics and after months of tweaking and bettering they still are utterly frustrating sometimes.

Ive lost count of how many times ive retrained my voice model over the years, initially i thought it was something to do with talking english in sweden, but its not, either language its the same stupid results.

As its been a slow add on over the years i should one day sit down and factory reset Everything and build up the house again not a prospect im looking forward too :O

Ive got over 70 zigbee/wifi lights and the ability to set groups and scenes and then voice control it (which works 99% of the time) i will never give up on.
Hue and wifi both being able to be controlled at the same time by 1 voice command. so Simple.

Ive moved away from smart speakers to nest hub displays and i would dearly love them to bring out an updated bigger screen version that isn't the poxy tablet thing they puked up recently. I had high hopes for that and would have bought 2 on day one if they weren't such a let down.

Summarise.

I feel like my google home setup is a voice activated light switch and an 8 minute time for cooking spaghetti :O
My god the frustration of asking it to set an 8 min timer... sometimes the crap that it thinks ive said actually makes me cry with laughter.

Still for all its faults its excellent and i hönsetly not want to live in a house without integration.

I'm looking to get heating controllers but thats not such a priority here for fine tuning because of the harsh winters.
I would like the security system to be integrated properly but i'm not keen on voice controls of it given how comically it reacts to spaghetti timers.....
I think its best to keep that separate..

I wish this forum had a smart home subsection.

Ive always been interested in the Other systems but i went the google route for ease .

Well that kinda just turned into a puke of text.
 
We've definitely noticed a decline in their performance too. You can be in the kitchen (open plan) and the speaker on the living room bookshelf will set a timer when you're right beside the kitchen display.
Asking for the news our kitchen hub often hangs when trying to get the update from Sky news.

Activating a scene for hue usually takes a couple of attempts. You think they'd be able to prompt you with a "did you mean?" as they always do when you really don't want to hear it.

It's also a shame when it's having 'wifi issues' that they haven't got a triggered automation to just restart the speaker at a set interval, or a notification on the Google home app to give you a heads up.
Sometimes it reads out the whole name of the TV because it's 'not available', when all we've asked it to do is turn on the living room lamp. It never calls out the other Google speakers for being unavailable when they're having a tantrum.

Personally I can't stand when you ask it something, it tells you it doesn't know, but gives you a list of results so you can read it yourself haha... "Sorry, I've finished for the day and can't be bothered to text to speech this for you"

We have night mode enabled and still get the late night shouting from it.

It would be interesting to know if they have a graph modelling the user/device relationship which shows how frustrated everyone is.

The Nest app and Google search are a mess but that's off topic. Maybe they're focussing development on profit rather than user experience, even though better UX would bring in more users.
 
One specific thing mines done..

I used to be able to say "hey Google, turn down reciever"
And it would turn down the reciever 5 clicks.
One day it randomly turned down the nest speaker on the exact same command .. And has never stopped.
 
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Mine is ok "most" of the time, but it can get frustrating. However I use it so much that I get more value out of it than not. Things like playing some music to specific rooms of the house, or bringing up my agenda, adding things to a shared shopping list (that my wife has access to) and so on is more helpful than not. We've set up a shared family calendar that we can both access so we can add things directly there like reminders and so on.

Honestly other than a few "niggles" it really does help. Sure it's spying on us and so on which is a little unnerving, but when you don't think about it (ignorance is bliss :D ) it's actually quite useful.

However it won't replace my PA at work - she makes google look like it's in the dark ages! :D
 
I have a problem with a Nest and Deezer. It'll play my flow (generated personal playlist) but if I request a specific playlist it says there is no Deezer account linked
Really annoying as when it plays the flow it seems to be the same starting songs everytime rather than a more random curation as it is on the Deezer app, limiting how much I want to use it.
 
Hey Google.
Both phone and speaker respond.

"who was the actor that played Mac gyvor"

I watch my phone write out the question perfectly
The nest beeps and bongs, thinks...

"Turning the bedroom lights on."

How the **** does that come to that conclusion?

I'm sat here just pulling a open mouth confused face ... I'm actually considering opening a ticket to Google asking them wtf is up these days
 
Listening to music on the Home/Nest Hub today.

Press the physical volume button to turn it down. Volume bar appears on screen but no change after 15 presses.

Touch the volume bar to where I want it to be. No change on screen but volume audibly drops several steps.

Press the physical volume button again, volume jumps to where it started.

It's like there are 2 bits of code running the volume, one is misbehaving and they're both interacting. I daren't give it a voice command for the volume.
 
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Watched '2001: A Space Odyssey' at the cinema and all I could think about during the HAL 9000 malfunction scenes was how annoying the Google homes have been lately :D
It will probably try to kill me on a hot day by putting the heating on full whack
 
I think the HA's getting dumber is the norm. I had a Google Home first gen for about 2-3yrs, and the experience started out well but the google software (as ever) was just experimental on Android and kept constantly changing with experimental features on the Home hardware. In the end I could barely get it to switch on my lights...

So at my new place I moved to Echo Dots via Alexa. The experience started off great and is still going well now for basic home control (lights, heating, device control) but the software for it is dreadful. Luckily I don't have to interact with it that much.
 
Is this a Google thing then?
Seems to be most of the replies here are Google. (me included) and Google is in far less homes than Alexa?
 
Google don't have a great track record with this stuff. I can't say my Alexa experience has changed much at all in the 6 or so years I've had their gear. It just 'works' - integrations into the main things are totally seamless, e.g. Hive or Hue. Fringe stuff depends on how well the 3rd party has done their homework e.g. Roberts radios (undok/Nuvola garbage).
 
LuckyBenski said:
Listening to music on the Home/Nest Hub today.

Press the physical volume button to turn it down. Volume bar appears on screen but no change after 15 presses.

Touch the volume bar to where I want it to be. No change on screen but volume audibly drops several steps.

Press the physical volume button again, volume jumps to where it started.

It's like there are 2 bits of code running the volume, one is misbehaving and they're both interacting. I daren't give it a voice command for the volume.
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You see this is stuff that just never happens with Alexa. You get a bit bizarre behaviour asking for Radio 1 to play in anothe room (it forgets you mean BBC radio 1) but other than that, it's seamless for music. Annoying my Sonos has Alexa but can't be grouped with Alexa devices as speakers tho :(
 
It barely understands times for cooking anymore. Not sure if its broke or not. I barely use it because of how annoying it is. I feel like I need to setup the lights every so often again.

Weekly it will also either start a radio or just announce some random rubbish too.
 
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I've also found this with Google stuff, often feels like it goes through periods where it is markedly worse at recognising what I'm saying. Its inability to learn annoys me too, the only radio station I ever really ask it to play is Radio 6 yet it will often mishear it as Radio 2. If it's not sure, then I'd rather it asked then just did the wrong thing. There are also still so many basic things it can't do too, like timers or alarms across devices. Aside from speaker groups it feels like the devices are completely unable to talk to each other.

A few months back I asked it something on a speaker, it misheard me and told me what my phone battery status was instead, which I thought was quite clever. So I asked it what my phone battery level was, and it said it couldn't tell me that. :confused:

The "Hmm...something went wrong, try again in a few seconds" is also perhaps the most irritating error message ever conceived.
 
First Google Home I had was bullet proof and made me buy in to Google/Nest equipment. Never failed to respond to a request or answer a question and was fast AF.

I then bought a Google Nest Thermostat which worked without issue for the first year, year and a half, and then it received an update and it stopped connecting to the Heat Link. Still under warranty but Google blamed my Wi-fi and weren't even prepared to investigate.

Pretty much down hill from that point for me. The Google Home started messing up simple requests, two Google Minis started mishearing me, turning on/off the wrong device and/or claiming devices that had worked weren't supported.

Their cloud infrastructure is either not man enough now or their software team are clowns, either way I've gone back to controlling lights with a light switch, my TV with a remote and my heating with a manual thermostat and I won't have another Google product in my house.
 
Google seems to do us well.. funniest 'miss-hear' was when I asked for a 30 minute timer for sausages.

It seemed to hear something similar, but started a timer for 30 minutes for what I can only assume is the produce of 'make up sex'.

"Your 30 minute timer for Sorry j*zz" starts now"
 
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