My terrible experiences with YouTube Music, and News
There are three things I use Google for in the car, and two of them I have terrible experiences with. These are Maps/Driving Mode (generally awesome sauce,) YouTube Music, and News (specifically what happens when you ask google assistant to tell you the news.)
I’ve already documented the News issues and a workaround that I have to use on a daily 15 minute commute. There isn’t a drive that goes by that I’m not saying “tell me the news” at least once because an error message has popped up somewhere. “Resuming where you left off” no google, you’re not. You crashed and popped a text error window on an invisible app instead of, I don’t know, saying “something went wrong with the stream, going to the next news item”.
The other error ridden voice activated service is YouTube Music. The scenario is the same – my 8yo wants to play something, I try to get it to play and it says “Playing so and so by such and such – looks like something went wrong try opening the YouTube app.”
This usually involves unlocking the phone (this always happens while I’m driving as a note,) opening the app and asking it to play (or in the case of trying to play Ghost of Vroom I just have to type it out because I have found no pronunciation that Google will accept to get it to play that). It usually works at identifying the song, just attempting to play the song errors out. Also it says YouTube app instead of YouTube Music which is odd, but even asking it to play on YouTube Music I get that.
When they work, awesome. I have almost no problems any more with Assistant at home, and the content we’ve got I’m happy with. Just the interface errors I’m experiencing with my stock Samsung S21 Ultra 5G running unmodified Google apps is amateur hour.
Non-logged errors of “something went wrong” and popups saying similar in News that aren’t visible because it’s running behind Driving Mode… these don’t help.
