Comment on Why are Google's Assistant(s) so bad nowadays?
Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The Assistan/Nest devices have gone to shit as well. When I first bought one about 5 years ago, it could:
- play many games (voice-controlled text adventures, multi-player gameshow-style trivia and party games, etc.);
- play music from my Google Music Library library with no commercials;
- play podcasts from 3rd party podcast providers;
- play almost any radio station that also had livestream feeds
Now all the games are gone, and ‘podcasts’ are just the small subset of podcasters who also upload their episodes to Youtube (whatever feed they used to use had almost every podcaster there was, even obscure ones); asking for specific episodes by episode number or date is totally broken. Playing radio stations is hit or miss, the voice recognition often picks a stream completely unrelated to the one I ask for; it is waaay worse at matching the callsign/city I ask for.
Playing music is intolerable. There’s a stupid commercial for Youtube Music Premium after nearly every track. NO, I will not upgrade to your freaking Youtube Premium.
Enshittification, thy name is Google.
badlotus@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
Have you heard of Homeassistant? It’s a self-hosted smart home solution that fills a lot of the gaps left by the most smart home tech. They’ve recently added and refined support for various different voice assistants, some of which run completely on your hardware. I have found they have great community support for this project and you can also buy their hardware if you don’t feel like tinkering on a Raspberry Pi or VM. The best thing (IMHO) about Homeassistant is that it is FOSS.
Homeassistant Voice Control