Since there is many people working on Google here there is bound to be people working on Assistant or Home in here. I use a lot of google products (Pixel, Nest Cameras, Hub, Speakers, Chromecast, Mesh Wifi, Thermostat etc.) and the experience is always frustrating. Want to turn of your cameras with Speaker? That device is not setup yet. Randomly talking speakers in the middle of the night is just creepy. Want to cast something? Your tv won't show up while it did yesterday. Home app gets worse over time. Features missing or they just disappear. Feeling crazy hot at night? Oh Thermostat decided it is "saving energy". Want to setup your device, the app will spin randomly and crash the setup couple times before it works. The list just goes on. So my question is does anyone do any testing on these products? Why do features disappear and no new features show up? Why doesn't shit just work? PS: I don't like Alexa products either.
I used to work in the Assistant and I second you. Many of the bugs I filed got closed without resolution and I am asked to reproduce it again as a reporter even when the issue is not deterministically reproducible, which, I understand, makes it harder to fix those bugs. Also, these bugs are routed to some contractors whose only job seems to be replying to these bugs and closing them most of the time. Assistant is also not a great org in terms of building high quality and well tested products, majority of the people are just interested in shipping features for impact and Google doesn't punish anyone if things break (which is a good thing but there are some side effects). I feel leadership is to be blamed partly. There have been some efforts to improve the quality aspect in recent times though.
Google sucks at consumer electronics that’s why. I sold my pre launch OG Alexa cylinder for a google home thinking it would have better NLP and it has but Google goes nowhere despite of that edge because rest of it sucks. You’ve listed that in detail so I won’t repeat it. In my opinion companies that have used people as product have tendency of ignoring people even when they make consumer products. Alexa makes up for the NLP with ton of integrations and ease of setup. I can just ask echo to show garage ring cam on firetv and it fucking works ! I don’t recall doing anything special. Good luck with google home app !
Except ads google products are half baked.
Stop putting corporate surveillance devices in your own home
This is not a discussion about using these devices or not. It is about the quality of a consumer product.
No idea how engineers on these teams make so much money. I have the same experience with Google Home, Pixel phones, Android auto. Terribly engineered and designed products.
Oh I forgot to mention this. Android Auto doesn't work on my Pixel 6 but it worked on all my Samsung phones before. It keeps disconnecting for no reason. Thanks Google.
Same. Audio calls almost always never route through my car's speakers or when they do, the sound comes from just one car speaker. Great deterrent to taking calls while driving 😂
Does any personal assistant work as intended? They were a terrible idea to commercialize under the pretense that they'll gradually improve. All of them are mostly just pieces of hardcoded rules.
I had developed an app for the assistant .. reported an issue that I discovered while developing the app .. went around in circles and after 2 years was asked to contact the “developer of the app” 😅.. the issue was not specific to the app which I had told them on day 1 And yes .. they could not reproduce the issue and get this .. I was asked for my account password 😅🤪 to see if they could reproduce it on my account 😂😂👍
That is crazy. So much incompetence...
Same problems here, and Alexa is a nonstarter. I’m about to swap to Apple home pods like my parents and brother have. Never have these problems at their places even while not a primary device user there. Even the kids can easily speak to control the speaker pods with their kid annunciation.
I often have to repeat several times for the Google assistant to turn off a light. Sometimes, it increases the brightness of a light in another room instead or it turns on another room. You also cannot group multiple devices into a group. As a result, I need to ask it to turn off each light one by one while Alexa can turn off an entire floor easily. Wtf is happening with the PM for Google Home?
Just get Alexa
Last time I tried Alexa the responses it gave to questions I had wasn't relevant to what I asked. Might need to try it again.
I have Alexa and I hate it. Amazon’s products are all shit, no exceptions