Google Assistant will lose 17 features in the coming weeks | Hacker News Reader

Google Assistant will lose 17 features in the coming weeks

theverge.com

23 pointsgoplayoutside11 comments

To be fair, I bought a Razr+ just before Thanksgiving, finally switching to Android, and I have no idea what Google assistant is for or how to use it. There's a gesture that's supposed to launch it that doesn't work, so I've just ignored it.

Sounds like I'd be PO'd if I'd bothered to put any effort into learning to use it. Google is the least trustworthy company ever for software users - it's Lucy holding the football for its beleaguered Charlie Brown software users...

>PO'd

Pissed off? Pissed offed? Piss offed? Piss Off 'd?

Any reply stating "Exactly", won't be laughed at.

I have heard and used 'P'd off', but only verbally.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…

Hello!

I looked through the features and they are all very obscure things that I have never used and likely never used by 99% of users. E.x. Who wants to send an email through the smart speaker?

> Who wants to send an email through the smart speaker?

People of limited mobility, without working limbs, holding babies, cooking etc.

The issue is that at google's scale even obscure features have millions of users. And since these features are mostly not offered by any other product, people become dependent on them. So discontinuing support will be highly disruptive.

Wonder if limiting commands will reduce misinterpretations. I once asked Google maps a question about the trip and it played a very obscure song. I asked it to stop and it played another obscure song.

As far as I understand, it uses general STT (which tries to transcribe everything, unlike say Picovoice which limits interpretation to only a few commands) + intent recognition. It probably can't interpret an utterance "stop" as anything other than its matching intent (even a bag of words classifier can) and since the STT's still the same, it probably won't change a thing.

Here we go again....millions of dollars in engineering time and effort goes down the drain.

Does anyone use it actually?

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