I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me as an Android and Google ecosystem user.
Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has not improved one iota in that time and has introduced several more quirks and bugs.
Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.
Yeah, for example just yesterday I was driving and an alarm went off for the phone in my pocket. I told Google Assistant to silence the alarm... and it refused, insisting no alarms were active. How the hell can such a simple use-case be failing so badly?
I suppose it doesn't matter, because they're going to disable the functionality entirely, [0] and setting ephemeral alarms is the literally the most common thing I ever ask it to do!
Part of what makes all the assistant-stuff so damn frustrating is that it's an opaque "try something random and hope for the best" box, and whenever it fails there's usually zero information about why and no resolution path. (In a way you can generalize that to a lot of "AI", which is depressing.)
