This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
Assistant was awesome. The voice isn't as punchable as Gemini's options.
I took an online course sponsored by Google years ago, when AI was but a twinkle in tech bros' eyes, and one of the Gemini voices is 1000% the presenter of that course.
Well that's not good. I use it to set alarms fairly often, and up until recently it used to work for navigation. I think me refusing the AI crap made "navigate to 123 main st" quit working.
Yeah, I bet it's just getting replaced with AI bullshit now.
So, now, when you use it to set an alarm, you'll never really know for sure if the AI fucked it up or not.
Fuck everything about this: Gemini sucks!
Gross.
That sucks. At least it was useful unlike gemini.
The timing is crazy, that's around the same time that Google and Android is expected to start disappearing from thousands of phones.
I degoogled (mostly) a while ago, but home assistant has a pretty configurable local voice assistant. If you have remote access to your server, I imagine you could cobble together a good keyword based personal assistant that sets alarms, turns lights on and off, and reads you an RSS newsfeed while you drink your morning coffee.
We're truly on the technological downslope now. First it was all about the user and making software accomplish a purpose, then it was all about the user as long as it was profitable, now it's fuck the user - be profitable.
It was a convenient way to set a kitchen timer. I never used it for anything else but this is still gonna hurt.
Considering when I first upgraded to a phone that included it, Gemini was incapable of setting a timer, I do not have high hopes for this.
This is to say, when I told it "set a timer for X minutes" it produced a UI on the phone that suggested it understood I wanted a timer, but failed the critical step of actually setting the damn timer. I immediately switched back to assistant, as there's really no coming back from a fuck-up that comprehensive.
