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Comment by thrwawy74 | Hacker News Reader

What annoys me the most is this:

"Hey Google, turn off the den light switch in 30 minutes"

"Sorry, for safety reasons we cannot...."

It's a light. Because it heard "switch" it thinks there might be some power tool connected to it and won't let me set delayed actions. I want to be intelligent with it like "Hey Google, turn turn the lights on when the sun comes up everday" but no one has gone to that next step.

Or how about "Hey Google, turn off the tone played when you say Hey Google". These settings aren't accessible from the voice interface itself.

Can't wait for Alexa to fail so my SmartTV will stop nagging me to use integrations I will never use. Anti-competitive but whatevs.

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some of the stuff google don't put effort into is super weird, like the whole if the device is in a different "room" it has to loudly announce what it's doing but if it's in the same room it turns down the volume on all of the devices for 10 seconds

really makes me think they almost want to discontinue it but it's so integrated with android and the chromecast they can't really kill it

I think you can set 'routines' now, might be able to help with sunrise actions - https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/7672035?hl=en-GB...

I have explored those, but I ran into many many issues when i wanted to build routines of routines. I wanted to compose a routine from others. I couldn't simply/directly invoke a routine from others without voice interpretation, and it led to strangely phrased triggers just to get it to work. It's frustrating that I should be able to make these explicit actions in the app, but it's just very clumsy. In the ideal scenario I should be able to configure all of that through the voice interface itself. "Hey Google, create a routine that initiates from "It's dinner time" that turns on all the lights in the dining room and sets them to 50% with the 'candlelight' color"

I hate how many products need to be configured from apps nowadays. You gave me the voice assistant and I can't use the voice assistant to manage the voice assistant. I shouldn't even need an iPad or phone to set it up. Give me a minimum local processing/interpretation so I can get it online and it can begin interpreting more articulate requests.

We are so far away from zen.

You can change the device type in Google home to work around the scheduling issue

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