Google Assistant reached levels of dumb today that are being mocked by my 10 year old
The Dumbening started last week with Home/Nest voice devices not being able to turn off either my Nest or my Cielo controlled thermostats. Today on the drive into my kid’s school we had a very fun trip where we learned Kate Bush only has one song that would play, Regina Spektor makes music that contains a total of 6-10 seconds and then ends, and attempts to play any individual song require me to unlock my device which is connected to my car, and then it plays a random TV show.
Let’s use a little smarts Google Assistant. If I am driving, connected to my car’s Bluetooth connection, don’t play movies?
This was not a good trip in. We did finally get it to play the only Kate Bush song in the entire universe in its entirety, but the goal at the outset was to play anything but that song.
The phone kept locking, requiring me to unlock it to get the wrong results. Something that was not supposed to happen for 4 hours or so because that’s how it’s set.
Attempts to play Good Times by Edie Brickell, or honestly Good Times by anyone who has recorded a song named Good Times (there are many) were greeted with that I needed to unlock my phone and what appeared to be a half-hearted effort to locate a TV show similar to, but not Good Times.
At this point my ten year old told me to stop because it was obvious that Google Assistant had the dumbs today and any and all attempts were futile. It was in response to this that Kate Bush started playing again, the only song that exists evidently, and attempts to skip it went to a song that never started playing or had an insane quiet intro, and then that one Kate Bush song… again.
While I’ve often had issues with Google Assistant while driving, this was picking up what I was saying. But man it was not returning anything useful today.
Apple PR – seriously, put a camera in my car you’ve got your next Siri advertisement.
