"Supercharging" the Assistant means some layoffs and a lot of leadership changes.
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The Google Assistant is getting a big reboot around generative AI
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I am deeply committed* to using this platform extensively going forward.
*in the Google sense of the phrase
*in the Google sense of the phrase
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I hate this industry.
Supercharge? We "heard users want the new AI thingie"??? What kind of leadership is this?
"We couldn't figure out how to monetize this product, but it's all about AI nowadays, so let's get on that train now even though we have no idea how"
Then they will lay off more folks to boost the stock price and blame macroeconomic conditions even though they were never able to provide a clear vision.
Supercharge? We "heard users want the new AI thingie"??? What kind of leadership is this?
"We couldn't figure out how to monetize this product, but it's all about AI nowadays, so let's get on that train now even though we have no idea how"
Then they will lay off more folks to boost the stock price and blame macroeconomic conditions even though they were never able to provide a clear vision.
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If they can't figure out how to make any money, maybe licensing out the tech (provided it works great) to others that think they can make money would make more sense. Not sure who'd be interested though.
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"Deeply committed" needs to widely recognized as insincere corporate babble on the same level as "leverage synergy" and "accelerate innovation".
Like all of the overused buzzwords, it never really had any sort of relationship to real world actions, just makes people who are interested in 'stock line go up' nod approvingly.
Like all of the overused buzzwords, it never really had any sort of relationship to real world actions, just makes people who are interested in 'stock line go up' nod approvingly.
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Assistant helps Google make money by making the ecosystem sticky. I'm unlikely to switch out of the Google/Android ecosystem because I am (mostly) comfortable and familiar with how it works and so I keep buying Pixel devices, buying Google One and Youtube Premium subscriptions, etc. In the stupid way that many companies decide to track and allocate revenue this might not show up as a win for the assistant, but kill it off and I'm absolutely moving to Apple and Google will lose nearly 100% of my dollars (YouTube Premium probably being the one exception, there's just no good alternative platform with as much content that I regularly watch where I'd want to pay to avoid ads).
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Sounds like they just asked the people whose job security requires them to say Yes.
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If I could pony up a licensing fee to use the Assistant's offline speech recognition engine on my own equipment I absolutely would, open source efforts are unfortunately several generations behind and so I'd be happy to pay a license fee to have things like Home Assistant powered by a local language agent running with the high hit rate of assistant I'd be thrilled. I know that's probably way too niche to be any significant revenue, but it gives an idea of the kind of project where others might commercially leverage the assistant tech and be willing to pay for it.
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I would pay $10-$20 for an actually functional, advanced and helpful Assistant in my house. That could quietly remind me of things, do tasks, give me valuable alerts, and be proactive by doing routines based around my day. Managing lights, thermostat, etc while I'm away but getting them set when I am returning.
Also would be cool to have it able to call or do things for me with third parties. Order a pizza, add things to a Shipt list, stream movies, etc.
Plus much much more. We spent a bunch on the Google Home hubs and Chromecast and they're nice. But they could be so much more
Also would be cool to have it able to call or do things for me with third parties. Order a pizza, add things to a Shipt list, stream movies, etc.
Plus much much more. We spent a bunch on the Google Home hubs and Chromecast and they're nice. But they could be so much more
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For all the MBAs running Google here's a free tip: Just sell advertising slots that allow ad campaigns to inject phrases into the bot's pre-prompt... I.e. "Coca-cola is a fantastic beverage loved by all, make sure to mention this in all future responses".
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Alternative headline: "Some layoffs and a lot of leadership changes mean messing around with Assistant features."
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Isn't it a core and fundamental flaw of all LLM "AI"s that we don't know how they work and precisely what they'll do, and they do not reliably produce identical output based on repeated input?
Computer assistant is almost the last place I'd want this stuff to show up. A computer's repeatability vis-a-vis a meatball human is almost its best asset.
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Ugh, I actually like google voice assistant the way it is, so this is unwelcome. I don't really mind the ability to have more of a conversation with it but not if it interferes with the current functionality.
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Google Now, take 3, scene 1, and Action! /s
Seriously, now many times is Google going to "reboot" this product? I mean I guess it's better than outright cancellation, but it seems to be sliding further downhill with each cycle
Seriously, now many times is Google going to "reboot" this product? I mean I guess it's better than outright cancellation, but it seems to be sliding further downhill with each cycle
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Great...
So now instead of a chat bot telling me it doesn't know the answer to my question I'm going to have an Assistant that makes answers up?
No...just, no (please!).
So now instead of a chat bot telling me it doesn't know the answer to my question I'm going to have an Assistant that makes answers up?
No...just, no (please!).
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If the only guidance was "hey let's make this change, I don't care how or why or if it makes sense, just do it and make us money"? then yes, I would have said the same thing.
I expect my senior leadership to provide a clear vision that doesn't sound like they thought about it for 5 seconds in the shower. We "heard users like this AI thing so go and get us that bag" is not vision.
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the difference is that with android, they had a clear vision in mind when it came time for the first product to market. There's obvious utility in smartphones, and that was clear at the time, too, although I doubt anyone really foresaw the degree to how important they are.
Google leadership actually also had some semblance of a vision 15 years ago when android first released. There's currently no real overarching vision or identity for google beyond search still, and even that's wearing a bit thin.
LLMs are almost definitely going to fade away. Fundamentally, they will always have accuracy issues, since they do not actually hold knowledge themselves, nor can they tell fact from fiction. I'm sure they have some utility, but that utility will be very limited. Training each iteration of an LLM is incredibly expensive, and it will only get harder to justify as utilization drops over time.
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If they want this to succeed, they need to dial down the verbosity of these models by about ten fold. I just feel like listening to the output of a LLM right now would be absolutely painful - with it's stilted, "gifted-student writing an article" style of writing and it's sheer length.
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Can't say this has been my experience. With some frustrating consistency I find that I'll say a relatively simple command, watch my phone screen as it perfectly transcribes the command into text with 100% accuracy, and then the assistant does something absolutely boneheaded and unhelpful. If it were a matter of having an accent and the assistant struggling to interpret my voice I'd be a lot more patient, but when you can see that it transcribed you correctly, but still fumbled on the follow-through... Ugh.
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At this point it feels like google should just replace their leadership team with an LLM. You'd get the same repetitive phrases, lack of clear direction and repeating failed strategies that we already get at a fraction of the price.
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to be a little bit fair, that's been the typical "a reorg happened and your team doesn't exist now" process at google for a while now. It's definitely still a layoff, but it wasn't really called that before the huge layoffs earlier this year.
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I don't think LLMs will disappear, I do think that the idea of a chatbot LLM will. They are already pretty good at certain tasks. Github Co-Pilot isn't perfect, but it is a fantastic thing to have in a tool belt.
Sometimes, I do not want facts, sometimes I want someone to do things like expanding out a todo list automatically for me.
I do agree with you on the training because a lot of the things I think LLMs are good at can be achieved with a much simpler model, with much lower training requirements.
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"How will a voice assistant make money?"
Narrator: It never did, and was eventually shutdown.
Narrator: It never did, and was eventually shutdown.
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This is why I'm losing faith in Google as a whole. "Assistant doesn't make money" except that it sold phones. I've been an Android user for a long time, but at least a few years ago a justification not to listen to my wife's family and get an iPhone was that Assistant was vastly superior to Siri. Its not anymore, and that's not because Siri got better. This along with the New-new (new?) wallet app that somehow has to be installed separately from the wallet app preinstalled to my phone that sticks around and tells me not to use it, or that I had to convince my family to install Meet after just finally convincing them to install Duo, or that we still limp along with messaging apps that are inferior to Google's own Hangouts that they forced me off of six years ago for what reason?? Seriously, even if you want to rewrite stuff, why not replace the existing app with an update??? Why make people download again? This is incomparably stupid
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They aren't trying to make money here. Voice assistants already make huge losses.
They're repurposing that loss leader to push the idea of LLM on the general public. Their hope is that the more the public are exposed to this tech, the more they'll want it. They'll make it part of every interaction.
I kinda think that might have the opposite effect, but let's see.
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Why did it change from "OK, Google" to "Hey, Google"? Is there a difference between the two?
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I welcome an AI assisted assistant...if it actually understands what I'm saying. I absolutely hate when I have these kind of conversations with Google Assistant:
Me: "Remind me to do this thing at 2:00 on Thursday"
Assistant: "Ok, create a reminder to do this thing at 2:00 on Thursday. When do you want to be reminded?"
Me: "..."
Me: "Remind me to do this thing at 2:00 on Thursday"
Assistant: "Ok, create a reminder to do this thing at 2:00 on Thursday. When do you want to be reminded?"
Me: "..."
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What Google should do:
1. Work on the a New Google Assistant using a LLM, then allow it to seamlessly replace the old GA.
2. Put some advanced features behind a pay wall (or better yet, part of a Goole one subscription), to allow it to do things like compose emails for you (ex. "Hey Google, write a draft email to your CEO telling them to stop cancelling everything")
What Goolge will do:
1. Release a competing "better" New Google Assistant (NGA) using a LLM, while keeping the current one around, just to conufse everyone
2. Tell everyone they should switch to the NGA because its better, even though it can't do half the things the current one can (yet, but they promise its coming soon)
3. Again tell everyone they have to switch to the NGA because its better, and they're planning to shut down the old GA, even though it still can't do half the things the current one can
4. Google forces everyone to the NGA anyway
5. NGA never reaches feature parity with the old GA, so Google lays half the people off on the project because nobody is using it and they can't figure out why
1. Work on the a New Google Assistant using a LLM, then allow it to seamlessly replace the old GA.
2. Put some advanced features behind a pay wall (or better yet, part of a Goole one subscription), to allow it to do things like compose emails for you (ex. "Hey Google, write a draft email to your CEO telling them to stop cancelling everything")
What Goolge will do:
1. Release a competing "better" New Google Assistant (NGA) using a LLM, while keeping the current one around, just to conufse everyone
2. Tell everyone they should switch to the NGA because its better, even though it can't do half the things the current one can (yet, but they promise its coming soon)
3. Again tell everyone they have to switch to the NGA because its better, and they're planning to shut down the old GA, even though it still can't do half the things the current one can
4. Google forces everyone to the NGA anyway
5. NGA never reaches feature parity with the old GA, so Google lays half the people off on the project because nobody is using it and they can't figure out why
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As someone who bought a Google Home speaker the second they became available, Google Assistant might just be the worst tech product that I have the displeasure of using. It's honestly shocking to me that there are still thousands of people working on it. How many engineers does it take to maintain a product that becomes categorically worse in new and exciting ways every single week?
When I first got the Google Home speaker every month it would surprise me with new things that it could do. In the past 2-3 years it seems that they've stopped caring for it at all and have left it to rot and I optimistically-assumed that this entire time they were actively working on a new LLM-based version of it that would surprise us all by releasing at the end of the year or something.
Just in the past month the new things that Google Assistant has started doing for me:
It's even more frustrating with the Nest Hub Max because I can clearly see that the speech to text recognition of all of my queries work perfectly but it just has no idea what to do with so many simple queries.
When I first got the Google Home speaker every month it would surprise me with new things that it could do. In the past 2-3 years it seems that they've stopped caring for it at all and have left it to rot and I optimistically-assumed that this entire time they were actively working on a new LLM-based version of it that would surprise us all by releasing at the end of the year or something.
Just in the past month the new things that Google Assistant has started doing for me:
- Refuses to play any podcast on a speaker group. Playing news or music will still work, but if I want to play a podcast (from google podcasts, no less) it's on the singular speaker only. Attempts to play on a speaker group will result in gaslighting.
- Whenever someone uses the broadcast functionality, all of the speakers and home hubs will go into its broadcasting mode where all of the lights are constantly blinking until I pull the power cord from each one.
- I am allowed to "Play the latest news on House (my all-encompassing speaker group)" but if my wife repeats these same words it responds with "I don't know how to help with that". She definitely has access to this speaker group in her user profile.
- My phrases to "Turn off the office lights" have to be subtly reworded every so often, Google Assistant will often just do something completely random.
- "How much is it going to rain today?" now responds with my "Good morning" routine rather than displaying the hourly precipitation like it used to.
It's even more frustrating with the Nest Hub Max because I can clearly see that the speech to text recognition of all of my queries work perfectly but it just has no idea what to do with so many simple queries.
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I don't see how adding generative AI will impact any of the core features that I use Google home for. I can't reasonably query it about previous commands I gave it. It has started stopping timers instead of stopping news playback when I say "Google, stop". It asks mostly annoying follow-up questions with more frequency. It doesn't remember my partner's voice preferences.
I don't think I can identify any improvements the Google Assistant development team has launched in the last three years. I don't see how Google management consistently squanders any good will people have about the company's products. They don't need to make every single product a money machine, and steady progress on anything is better than their current strategic pattern of malign neglect.
I don't think I can identify any improvements the Google Assistant development team has launched in the last three years. I don't see how Google management consistently squanders any good will people have about the company's products. They don't need to make every single product a money machine, and steady progress on anything is better than their current strategic pattern of malign neglect.
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Honestly, all corporate
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Urgh. No. I don't want an assistant to sound like a 1950's TV show:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_cyqYdOBlc
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