The right white noise comes back to Google Assistant, other things broken again
If you live near a train switching “bump” yard (or anywhere loud really,) chances are you’ll know the beauty of Google Assistant’s white noise feature. We use it at the King household to block out a lot of the 3am buffer braking noise the railroad added in the past four years that reaches 160+db (yeah, it was measured, no they’re not fixing it to comply with federal regulations.)
A couple of weeks back Google changed the white noise from a 1 hour mostly random track to a 10 minute muffled guessable track. If you’re not aware, white noise works best when it’s random or your brain catches that it’s on repeat. I’m not sure how much the randomness helps, but a white noise machine I reviewed a while back said if you can guess it it will nag at you.
Side note, for about a week I have not slept correctly so maybe that’s true. Alternately maybe it being 16f / -8c has more to do with that. Don’t know.
In a probably related note, while we’re back at December 2021 levels of functionality for Google Assistant, I’ve seen the return of the inability to turn the TV off, as well as failures to play YouTube Music with “something went wrong, try opening the YouTube app and try again” while attempting to play music in the car.
All of this happened the same day my kids watched the Creeped out episode “Help” in which a smart assistant decides to be creepy. So there’s that.
[9to5Google, although discovered the update myself so me as well]
