Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

Another step in Android's steady progression of become less and less useful hands-free. It's incredible to me that my experience with my Nexus One in 2010 was better than it is today with a Pixel 7. The fact that it arbitrarily decides to not recognize some contacts on some days. The fact that it can't handle me spelling out a street name when it insists on replacing the street name that I'm saying with something completely different. The fact that YouTube Music would always play "some driving music" that it chooses over my playlist literally called "Driving Music", when I would say "Play my Driving Music Playlist on YouTube Music". And now the assistant is getting even less personalized, which means it will care even less about what you're literally saying, and just send you into a swamp of generic assumptions.

Assistants were SO much more usable when they would require strict trigger language, and interpret it literally and formulaically. Yes you would have to learn its language, but once you did, you could actually accomplish what you wanted to accomplish, unlike today.

Google needs to toss Sundar and get a competent CEO who can forcefully smash the org back into line.

Google has turned into these little micro clusters of ideologies and functional philosophies, leading to a horrifically fragmented mess of google branded products. All which come loaded now with end-of-life anxiety as google just farts out products that seem to dissipate just as fast.

The fact that most google apps function better on iOS than Pixel phones should be enough to get any sane board to take action. This is without even mentioning the disaster that search has become, or completely dropping the ball on LLMs.

> Google has turned into these little micro clusters of ideologies and functional philosophies, leading to a horrifically fragmented mess

Every large software org eventually becomes Microsoft.

Google would be lucky to become another Microsoft. As things are going now, it's likelier to become another IBM.

I think upper management at big tech thinks having these internal warring factions somehow creates better products. What I hear from friends in FAANG is the VPs and directors don't even know what they're supposed to be working on most of the time.

Mine decided to helpfully alert me that there were three birthdays on January 1st, because it had somehow reset some contacts' birthdays to Jan 1, 1970.

Except when I went to check the Contacts to fix them, they had no birthday at all.

Death by a thousand cuts.

Yep. It is a pretty useless device if you cannot hold it in your hand and unlock it. So for example, when I ride my bike I can pause the music or receive a call and not much else.

I wonder how many road deaths their declining hands-free quality has contributed to? I'd wager the number has more than two digits. It's one thing to never have supported something hands-free, but when something that you used to be able to regularly do hands-free all of a sudden doesn't work, drivers are bound to get frustrated and use the device hand-held.

another thing your pixel 7 cannot do: copy Chinese text.

even on apps like google maps. open any place with Chinese chars in the name. toggle the app switcher carousel. try to select the name of the place. only non Chinese text will be copied.

I'm pretty convinced this is because the app switcher can recognize _whether_ a part of an app's UI is a native text field and not just an image, but it's not smart enough to pull the text out. I've seen it make number 0 -> letter O and other such mistakes before, so I'm convinced it's using OCR. Which is probably harder for Chinese.

It's crazy to me that it can't just use the accessibility APIs.

It is indeed using OCR. You can even copy text out of a screenshot of text in this way

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