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.

This is by design. They’re trying to frustrate you, because they’ll then upsell you on the “premium” subscription later on that returns the “old ways,” all while mining your data. And if you continue to use the free stuff, they’ll just mine you harder with AI.

They’re angling for a rent-based economy where they’re the landowners and we’re the sharecroppers paying to use their stuff. The only way out is to de-google and start taking your privacy seriously.

I’m wondering if there’s a paid and private-ish personal assistent. I’m turning away from all the software where I’m the product. Any ideas?

I can’t address most of it, but under gesture navigation there’s an option to swipe from the corner to invoke the assistant. I entirely agree that the power button is for “power”, and I don’t know why you would try to change that.

They have no incentive to fight the voice assistant war anymore. That decisively ended in the late 2010’s with no winner, because they moved onto the next buzzword technology by then. At this point, GA is just on life support, and will continue being a piece of garbage, as they remove more features from it, under the notion that the userbase is not large enough.

I have a theory that this is intentional design.

When products perform smoothly, you don’t interact with them, they become invisible, & Uncle Googs needs you interacting with their products as much as possible.

Thanks to telemetry, Good Ol’ Uncle Googs has millions of hours of behavioral patterns to sift through, provided by all those free Chromebooks for school districts across the US.

So Google know exactly what gets folks engaging with their phones &, I believe, intentionally cause frustration over seemingly simple tasks b/c many many people will forget what they were doing, fix the issue, then get distracted by entertainment apps, doom scrolling, etc.

Dark patterns & behavioral manipulation.

I don’t use it often but lately it stopped being able to turn off my flashlight for no reason. Can only turn on. I wonder if it’s just to get people to use Gemini. It’s a shame because I found the normal assistant capable enough for my needs.

Just so you know, your name’s visible in the “Gemini crashes” image.

I have had a Google home for years and I wholeheartedly agree. It is like they lobotomized it a couple of years ago?
Commands that it could do when I bought it, to my amazement (wow it can do that‽), is long gone. Now it feels like it struggles even with the most simple commands such as playing news or turning on a light.

Wonder what happened.

because in order to make it kind of work, you have to enable the settings that record all your data

I think that this is the result of a KPI.

At some point there was a fight inside Google between engineering and marketing about how to proceed with product development. Engineers wanted a better product, marketing wanted more eyeballs.

As a result, search became about “engagement”, or “Moar clicks is betterer”.

Seen in this light, your triggering of the assistant four times increased your use and thus your engagement. An engineer would point out that this is not a valid metric, but Google is now run by the marketing and accounting departments, not by engineers.

Another aspect that I only recently became aware of is that in order to get promoted, you need to make a global impact. This is why shit is changing for no particular reason or benefit and has been for a decade or so.

Google as an organization is simply dysfunctional. Everything they make is either some cowboy bullshit with no direction, or else it’s death by committee à la Microsoft.

Google has always had a problem with incentives internally, where the only way to get promoted or get any recognition was to make something new. So their most talented devs would make some cool new thing, and then it would immediately stagnate and eventually die of neglect as they either got their promotion or moved on to another flashy new thing. If you’ve ever wondered why Google kills so many products (even well-loved ones), this is why. There’s no glory in maintaining someone else’s work.

But now I think Google has entered a new phase, and they are simply the new Microsoft – too successful for their own good, and bloated as a result, with too many levels of management trying to justify their existence. I keep thinking of this article by a Microsoft engineer around the time Vista came out, about how something like 40 people were involved in redesigning the power options in the start menu, how it took over a year, and how it was an absolute shitshow. It’s an eye-opening read: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

Fortunately, you can just append the word “Reddit” to your Internet query and it’ll take you straight to the most helpful answer…

Well, shit:-(.

Stack overflow also had a similar situation causing people to strike.

Enshittification has ruined so much in the world of tech.

The reason? It’s right there in the title:

Google.

My most common use for Google assistant was an extremely simple command. “Ok Google, set a timer for ten minutes.” I used this frequently and flawlessly for a long time.

Much like in your situation it just stopped working at some point. Either asking for more info it doesn’t need, or reporting success while not actually doing it. I just gave up trying and haven’t used any choice assistant in a couple of years now.