I guess it’s time to get serious about homeassistant
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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George Orwell was wrong. We didn't need the government to bug our houses, we did it ourselves. 🤦♂️
Whatchu mean we?
I got dumb troglodyte everything.
So Google half baked a product, pushed it to the public whether they wanted it or not, and now it's giving up on it replacing it with another half baked product nobody asked for...
Seems par for the course for Google
In all fairness, in the early days of Google Assistant it really was useful. It actually worked. Somehow in the last 5 years it plummeted. As in it stunningly and noticeably kept getting worse year after year.
I have been saying for years my phone was so much smarter in 2015. I don't know what happened. I could rename it talk to it and it was responsive and did what was asked. Crazy.
what happened
Enshittification, LLM's
Nah that's a recent thing. Google assistant has been going downhill for ages long before this recent obsession with LLMs
Same with search! In the mid 2010's they removed a lot of the advanced search operators. Enshittification.
It turns out having too much control over what you find makes you spend less time looking (at ads).
Then they jammed in llm shit, for reasobs both simple and cynical and reasons convoluted stupid abd cynical.
Mine used to be fantastic for recipes. It was nice having a small screen in the kitchen dedicated to recipes and background music. You could ask it for a recipe, it would automatically search for one, trim the mandatory “story of my family eating this meal so I can copyright it as a creative work” intro, and compile the recipe in easy-to-follow steps. But now I ask it for a recipe, and it just goes “I didn’t understand, but here are the search results.” Which just opens a web browser, meaning all the biggest reasons to use it (not digging through search results, skipping the intro, compiling everything into a step-by-step list that you can follow along with, etc) are all gone.
I only had it because it was a gift, but it was honestly extremely handy when my hands are busy and I didn’t want to be digging around on my phone constantly. But not anymore, because at least I have an adblocker on my phone.
Amazon Alexa has followed the same trajectory.
As has Siri.
It used to have all kinds of plugins, like Wolfram|Alpha, that let you do fun and silly things with it.
It's simply gone downhill ever since.
The new Apple intelligence siri is arguably even worse. I tried asking it what the date would be next Tuesday, all I got back was "I don't understand".
Unintelligent Siri managed to crack that one without fault.
I still miss Google Now
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My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn't have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I'd write, "Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room." Of course then we'd have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we'd receive a reply saying, "Fine, turn on the light in the dining room." The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.
We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.
Totally read that in Abe Simpsons voice
I am shocked…shocked! that Google would let a product die on the vine and cease supporting it. Google assistant is dead, long live Gemini assistant!
Its about generating investor buzzwords and killing off beloved apps every 3-6 months.
As I understand it, Google mostly ships new stuff that they let die because it's one of the only ways to get a promotion at Google - to ship a product.
Once shipped, the newly promoted staff moves on to something else, and the business people take a look and see if the product actually makes any sense from a financial perspective, which is rarely the case.
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I Still get their apps confused because of the stupid icon updates....or maybe I stupid and can't learn new things.
Their new icons are so dumb. I think they thought people would get used to them but no, they’re still bad after several years.
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Don't put extra internet connected microphones in your house.
I work for an un-named company that makes stuff that has google assistant on them. Initially we put hardware mutes and piped the microphones to physical hardware that monitored for wake up words locally and would then start piping the microphone data to the mother ship once it was heard. Google told us to stop that, only way to certify the product as compatible with Google Assistant was to pipe the raw microphone data to the mother ship 24/7. That was 5 years ago and I removed all devices from my house.
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It can't even properly schedule reminders anymore, the one fucking thing I used to for.
If they kill Home. I’m done with Google products. I’m heavily integrated into nest and Google home. If they kill it further. I’m out.
If you really do swear them off, you will have dodged the next many bullets. They have made a solid pattern of killing off things we want. Generally, things we want don't make them enough money.
I used to support the Home team. I saw them grow from nothing when I worked there. It’s pathetic what they are doing to everything.
It was never going to succeed because it doesn't bring Google money.
And we can't have a good commercial alternative because google bought them up and destroyed them for competing. Enshitification...
How tf are they still convincing users to join, or try new products is the real question.
Long time google assistant user, but them putting Gemini in it is what I'm afraid of, not the solution.
This is yet another "google released a product, didn't know what to do with it, and made zero updates over the last decade, so now they're killing it." I don't think they've ever fixed the bugs that existed the first day I bought mine. The speaker is handy for casting to, but also cast is a shitty non-open protocol.
Kinda just agree with the "everything in this space sucks" unfortunately.
Give me a good non-cloud voice control system that works and I'll switch in a second. And on another note: The "Hey Google" command is so fucking annoying.
Idk if this covers your needs, but Home Assistant is non-cloud and supports voice commands. They're selling a voice hardware now (preview edition):
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
While I've used HA for years, I've never tried any of the voice command methods, so can't really comment on it. I had just recently came across their voice hardware and am probably going to give it a try.
I assume this is going to arrive at the solution of "Upgrade to Gemini-supported devices today!" Yeah, no thanks. I wish I could get Home Assistant working with my nest minis.
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5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that "AI" is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year's more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they've ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.
You got to love the author of that article. If you want the lights to turn off and on normally, maybe people should use light switches. Those aren't going to break due to software downgrades, those don't require Gemini or internet connections.
And I understand, there are rare situations when throwing the internet at your home appliances can make sense for solving niche problems. Those situations definitely exist, but for almost everyone almost all of the time, but it's pretty fucking easy to turn lights off and on.
Lights are one of the areas where I think automation is genuinely useful, but my rule with anything "Smart" is that it has to be able to run 100% locally.
It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not "no switch".
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I have a fan plugged into a smart switch that I’ve set to turn off when I fade up my mic while doing my radio show. It’s the most glorious use of throwing the internet at a home appliance I’ve yet come up with.
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I guess it's time to get serious about homeassistant
so glad i use google home as a sirius speaker and speaking to it is the only way i can control it /s
I don't use Google assistant to control any other devices but the amount of stuff I ask 'hey Google's to do over the last few years has gotten worse than when it first started. More often now I just play music to it via Bluetooth connection.
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Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.
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