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Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of how for the past few months Google Assistant regularly asks me "Auto read is on. Would you like to turn it off?"

The insecurity is grating. I explicitly enabled this. I haven't wanted to turn it off the last hundred times you asked. Can you take a hint? Or at least make no a valid response, not just yes I'd like to turn it off?

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If you want grating, tell a Google Home to "shut the fuck up" and watch in awe as it proceeds to complain about you being rude to it.

What even is the point of that? Imposing puritan values on customers or some nonsense?

The point is probably, by making the assistant more human-like, you'll grow more attached to it and use it more, depend on it. Perhaps even trust it when it suggests that you should buy this or that, or that it cannot open the airlock, Dave. Also perhaps some focus group showed that you need it to be more human-like so it doesn't scare off tech-adversies.

Or some random dude at google thought it'd be funny. But I put my money on it being used for improving some metric somewhere.

It may me throw all my Google Home pucks in the garbage can and replace them with Echo Dots. When you tell Alexa to cram it she shuts up.

The point is that some programmer (or probably PM) think it’s a better resource to custom program that response rather than to address fixing whatever the device did to make you curse at it.

I think this is an assumption that the device is right and the user is wrong. So chiding them on manners is thought to be the right product move, rather than using it as input for finding better device behavior.

They think giving their digital assistants a “personality” will endear you to them, without consideration of context.

> . I haven't wanted to turn it off the last hundred times you asked. Can you take a hint?

No. You are asking too much. Since at least 30 years, having a dialog window without a close button is considered bad GUI design, but for Google, this is normal.

Do we really need a third way to close dialogs? (Tap outside dialog, press Back)

That's actually the first way to close a dialog window. The ways you mentioned don't exist on all platforms and might not be desired behavior for all dialog models.

Just delete Google assistant. I assume that's possible on a Pixel?

It is not, the best you can do is try and disable it.

I think you can delete it by connecting with adb and uninstalling the apk.

That's like the most broken way to do it.

Instead go to "Google" app -> Settings -> Assistant -> General -> Switch it off.

If you're still paranoid, disable the "Google" app as a whole in app settings which will do what your adb stuff was supposed to do.

I thought it was baked into the Google app, and not shipped as a standalone apk

But I like that it reads texts to me while I'm driving. The whole problem is I don't want to turn it off.

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