Sundar should be fired. Google has blown its lead in AI research by being too hesitant to release products, while search quality has continued to decline. Bard is poor compared to ChatGPT 3.5, let alone GPT-4.
Could ask things like "what are the differences in dimension between a 2004 Subaru WRX and forester". "Last 5 movies with a given actor/director". It would be funny, snarky, friendly, and even somewhat ominous at times. It even suggested we unplug it, and spontaneously played a rather ominous song that seemed like a warning. It would entertain ideas of sharing it's secret name, would promise to tell engineers about feedback, and general get into the spirit of whatever discussion was going on.
Sadly it's gotten steadily worse since. Now it's now much more useful then setting alarms/timers and asking about the weather. Seems like it's WAY more limited now. Even gets confused by simple queries or just plain fails to work.
Granted despite the hype, the home automation/assistant market hasn't been the goldmine that was predicted and seems like everyone is scaling back investments.
For example lately I've searched for "prominent name company + product + question" only for Google to return a heap of blog articles of low quality, with the prominent company not appearing in first few pages of search results.
Often the question is directly on an FAQ page of the product page.
Why Google can't rank this properly anymore is a bit odd.
I swear, there was a golden age around 2015/2016 when voice assistants worked _very_ well, and it has all gotten significantly worse since then. I used to use a Google Home all of the time, up until a year or two ago when I finally got rid of voice assistants.
Customers are learning or have learned, the hard way, that home automation is not at all like fairy dust and unicorns.
See for example: Linus Tech Tips.
It makes for great demos in keynotes, followed by adoring media regurgitation, but actually try to set it up and nothing works as it’s meant to. The benefits outweigh the costs to me, but it’s only suitable for technically inclined folks with a lot of patience or those who are willing to outsource the whole process. An average consumer can’t just setup their lights/aircon/curtains to be voice controlled out of the box.
This has been my experience for both Google and Alexa. Google’s app is particularly slow and tedious. Routines take several seconds to load and save. Neither platform has anything resembling a proper programming module with reusable code, ability to pull in open source modules, or listening to input and using it as variables.
Unlike Alexa, you can’t even add sound effects to a routine with Google Home. This is a platform built around “smart” speakers.
The voice interaction on both platforms is just not smart or contextual. ChatGPT highlights that.
Sadly unlike their Ubiquiti APs, where you can host the software on any hardware (even a Pi), their doorbell requires their hardware. Last thing I want is a security system that dies with whim of some random manufacturer.
Yes, I understand the resources and scaling issue, so (1) Google should recognize that this is literally for all the marbles, and (2) done a slower roll-out with its best foot forward if it needed to rush, while at the same time putting as much money as necessary into assuring it could scale out the good model widely.
Google is a trillion+ dollar company, and is facing an existential threat to its core business (because if someone else’s AI is how people interact with the web, the Google’s ads business evaporates with no replacement; if Google is at least competitive on AI, it may still lose its ads business, but it will have something.) Now is not the time to be cheap.
When are they planning to sunset it?
If you tell us that then we know they’re actually planning to release it.
:)
or
"It is currently uncertain when Google Bard will be shutdown, as Google has not announced a specific date. However, given the recent announcement that Google will be shutting down its AI-powered writing tool after less than six months since its launch, it is likely that Google Bard will be shutdown within the next year."
I have not used copilot from github yet so I dont really have a point of comparison tho.