this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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[–] finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 44 points 1 day ago (6 children)

It's cool how they've broken assistant so badly that commands like "Call Mom" and "Set a timer for 20 minutes" no longer work for me the majority of the time.

[–] djdarren@piefed.social 1 points 22 hours ago

I'll never forget; 2014, iOS 8 had just come along with some huge advances in Siri. I'm driving across West London to pick up my wife, who's just text me about something. I figured I'd reply by dictating the message to Siri.

After five attempts and absolutely zero success, I just pulled over and tapped out a text.

Apart from setting the odd timer, I don't think I ever used Siri again after that. Not on purpose, any way.

[–] Sabin10@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I tried to set a reminder yesterday and is proceeded to search Google for "set a reminder for 9pm". AI is making my phone less useful and it's infuriating. Even worse, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I guess it depends on geminis mood?

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What's worse is they've added it to Android Auto. A couple days ago I told it to call my wife and it proceeded to search for local businesses containing my wife's name.

[–] MurphysPaw@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Luckily you can disable it... For now!

[–] hovercat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 1 day ago

It's awesome that one of the best features of my TV, "Find my remote" has been completely broken. Paid extra for the fancy Bluetooth remote and everything, and now it's completely worthless. Every time I ask, I get "Sorry, I'm not set up to do that" despite it being something that I've been doing the past 5 years without issue

[–] Prox@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Set an alarm" is similarly totally fucked now. I used to use the Google assistant for simple stuff like that, but now it's way easier to just open the clock app and set the reminder myself. Then they added a widget/shortcut to identify the song playing in the room, and now I don't need the assistant at all.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

That is the worst about it. They have made it worse. Sure it might be able to "do more" but I don't want the more I want it to be able to navigate to places by voice send a text and call people. Oh my God is calling people so bad. They are not in your contacts because it thinks I said something different.

[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago

I used to use Google Home speaker for a grocery list.
It's handy but like is that the reason I have an always listening device in my home? Is that all it can do?? That was before they removed features from the list commands. Jesus wept, good riddance

[–] maniclucky@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If your assistant is alexa, you can disable alexa plus and it'll go back to the original non-LLM backend.

I only use amazon products when I have no other options. I use google assistant, which was the only voice assistant I ever felt was even vaguely competent.

It used to be able to do some very useful stuff, like setting location-based reminders, but they've slowly been pulling functionality out and I'm sure I won't have an option between it and gemini for much longer.