Oh no, it "improved" several times - often getting worse. Which is why I was almost happy, reading the headline - sorry for the involved devs (who were likely crying in their 6-figure salary anyway) , but the best thing that could happen to Google Home/Assistant is to just stop messing with it.
I've noticed many things breaking like that. Features that aren't a major factor in a company's revenue seems to just get worse and worse the more people work on them. For example has happened to every voice chat program I've tested, skype, steam, battle net etc.
Devs are a general purpose resource that translate business requirements into software, you are describing a product management failure. Unless Google forces devs to also be product managers? I can't believe that's true.
Yeah, this is one of those products that Google has that somehow miraculously keeps getting worse. It's failings are particularly noticeable now that I can spend all day having rich conversations with ChatGPT, but Google assistant is telling me "I don't have any information on that" when I ask it the simplest of questions.
It would be so great on Android if we could totally disable button and setup nagging screen for the voice assistant.
The last thing that appears recently is the setup of the voice assistant forcefully showing up each time you connect and reconnect to a Bluetooth audio device. I'm so pissed off about that.
That's how I was rolling until I got a new (to me!) car to replace a very old banger. It has phone connectivity and it's great, but it basically requires voice control, which works quite well. This meant I had to re enable the Google app.
I want the feature, I just want to be in control of when and how that feature is used, not have it pushed hard in my face repeatedly.
I'm on a Samsung Fold, the default UI mercifully keeps the Bixby assistant well out of my way. But I have to disable the Google app to get rid of the voice assistant activating at random times.
On Pixel 7 if you press the power button, even for a long time, it will not shut off. Instead Google Assistant is popping up, which is very annoying and unintuitive. Not sure if they fixed it for the Pixel 8.
I'm considering getting a Pixel 7 or 8, how do you like your device in general? I'm looking for a cheapish, hassle-free device that doesn't require much maintenance or tinkering with and that just works.
For cheapish, put an "a" at the end. Unless you're looking for a status symbol or the ultimate camera, you won't care about the difference in models.
Pixels are great phones, I've been on them since they were still called Nexus. There are hints of enshittification, with Pixel-only features and what not, but it's not gotten out of hand yet, and I will argue Pixels are the best (non-de-Googled) Android experience -- as they are meant to be Android showcases.
Thank you! This sounds like it's what I am after. I've been using Xiaomi phones for the same purpose, but they started neglecting software side heavily since last year or so. This should be a good replacement.
Counterpoint: On iPhone, I use this feature all the time (mostly to set alarms tbh, but occasionally to start loading some music or else). There's a reason it's there and easily accessible.
(and you can disable it from settings if you'd rather not have that)
"The affected employees were data scientists, it said."
Yeah, seems likely. The methods they used for the voice assistant are probably no longer relevant so the data science parts of voice assistant probably gets reduced.
However this part is strange:
"The document also noted that some of the affected employees had been transferred from the Bard team to the Assistant team last Friday and received an invite to a meeting about their role just hours later."
Were they already pushed away from the Bard team? Or maybe that is why they ended these roles, to force them to go back to Bard?
Or, they wanted to lay off people from both teams but laying off people from your fledgling product is seen as a bad move so you transfer them to the dying product then lay them off from there and no headline will read "google lays off engineers working on bard due to it being a colossal failure"
It's pretty stunning that no one has hooked their voice assistant up to an LLM yet. Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. are all trash that could easily be improved 1000x by leveraging existing LLM technologies.
I believe it's because it's at least a magnitude more expensive to run an LLM instead of a basic voice assistant ML model. Especially when considering anyone who has purchased a Google Nest Mini can use it, for free, forever.
run "set timer" and "what's the weather" and "turn on the lights" through some regexes as a first pass and save the LLM for the complicated stuff. actually, with some caching they can probably cut costs pretty heavily there too.
I’m guessing they are already doing this. Adding an LLM is asking to add a very expensive thing to the long tail of queries which likely cannot be cached.
And when you consider these voice assistants already feel at risk for further investment due to subpar results, it makes sense. Bit of a catch-22 though as many of us have given up on expecting much out of our existing ones
But a lot of the question /responses could be trivial cached. No need to run expensive LLM every time for the same basic "how are you today?" prompts, it only has to be cached once.
Caching static requests alone is hard enough. With all the ways you can ask this question, welcome to the most complicated caching backend ever. Caching exact matches would also not help much because of this.
Then you’re kind of defeating the purpose of an llm.
Fixed responses for common queries is what we have now.
Not to mention that LLMs tend to be very wordy right now. I’d hate to way 20 seconds to hear my phone say “As a voice assistant I’m not aware of the exact menu of the Thai restaurant on 2nd, but I have opened a google search for it and found the following results.
That will be great, everyone expects much more from "AI" (and at least I consider voice assistants to be an early AI prototype) and it would be great to have voice assistants understand what we ask better (like ChatGPT would, and perhaps Bard).
They're fully committed until they are not. That what sucks about Google and that culture of always buying a fancy domain name and building this new business about it. They were as ecstatic about their Siri alternative, and I wouldn't be surprised they would ditch bard again for whatever fancy new thing is.
It is okay for products to be lame and underwhelming, granted there are users and use cases for them
Google had a whole storefront branded for recruitment at AfroTech on Wednesday. Despite layoffs, either HR still has budget to spend and/or they're still hiring.
Nah, you don't have to interview again, all you need is to look at open positions and contact a manager and if they say yes you got it, no hassle and you can start directly. It is good for both, you don't need to interview and the manager can see your performance reviews and code, so much easier to avoid bad engineers. Managers prefers internal candidates for this reason, so shouldn't be hard at all to find a new position unless you performed badly.
There aren't* open positions and there haven't been since August 2022. These used to be soft landings, now they're a brutal quick goodbye. Awful environment internally that I'm very glad to have left (voluntarily) recently. This was one of many silent layoffs. I found it dark and sad that Flexport took a lot of heat for rescinding offers, Blind's stuffed full of people who passed interviews & entered team match 14 months ago
* a significant number of open positions, i.e., these events are well understood to be terminal now in practice. Times are strange
Ah, I left years ago so wasn't aware. But not surprising, they constantly whittled down benefits or nice things or transparency when I worked there. Just a matter of time before things got this bad.
> There aren't* open positions and there haven't been since August 2022.
This is plainly incorrect.
Source: myself applied to an open position I saw internally on Grow in May 2023 (earlier this year), had a few talks with the team just to figure out whether it was a good match for both sides and to talk about my previous experience. Been happily on that team since June. And I wasn’t laid off either, my previous team/org just ended up becoming a poor self-destroying environment due to some very questionable leadership decisions (which led to a lot of level-headed leadership people that kept it together just quitting in anger, along with many senior+ level ICs), so it was time for me to go (as i felt like i started losing my brain cells trying to follow the leadership that didn’t know what they wanted and were running around like beheaded chickens, all while my actual tech skills were starting to deteriorate).
The whole process was just a regular click and apply for an open position, without knowing the manager or anyone else in that org. No whiteboard interviews or anything like that. And I am not some rockstar engineer or whatever, just a decent L4.
Sure, it's plainly incorrect, if you ignore the asterix.
He didn't need a massive in-line disclaimer about there being more-than-zero, because #1 that's obvious #2 his thing was "ah it's fine because they still do it the old way"
Old school defrags, like the one I went through in 2017, were a completely different animal. They lined up replacement jobs for you and also let you find another. They do not do that now. Now you are cut off from all corp immediately except Grow and Gmail.
To be very clear, you are lucky. The number of Grow postings is a fraction of a fraction of what it was before August '22.
A massive number of your colleagues were let go in January and about as much have been let go since in individual firings.
It disgusted me that your reaction amounts to "Overblown! I transferred! Btw here's a rant about how much I hated my old team at my current job that flattens everyone to characters!"
I highly suggest talking to your peers more and also not flattening others to caricatures. There's a reason Memegen is worked up and despondent and it's not because everyone else is overemotional and won't take advantage of the plethora of opportunities to change it up.
If Memegen is a bridge too far because you can't forcefully interrogate people whose feelings you don't understand without your employer seeing, try Blind. What I said is absolutely completely 100% uncontroverstial.
> The number of Grow postings is a fraction of a fraction of what it was before August '22.
Entirely fair, heard the same from others. The first time I opened Grow ever was in the first month of 2023, so I wouldn’t have noticed it myself.
> A massive number of your colleagues were let go in January and about as much have been let go since in individual firings. It disgusted me that your reaction amounts to "Overblown! I transferred […]”
I am sorry, what? I was talking solely about transfers after August of 2022. Yeah, there were some periods between then and now where transfers were nearly impossible. Yeah, I had to send about 40+ applications on Grow over the course of a couple months before I heard back from just one (which, luckily enough, worked out). But saying they are straight up impossible is unfair, given that almost everyone from my old team who didn’t get laid off managed to find a transfer after a few months of active searching (which, from what I heard from
those who used Grow for years before, is indeed way more difficult than it used to be before August 2022).
And layoffs weren’t overblown at all, and I never claimed they were. In fact, they were partially responsible for my old team disintegrating. Half my team got laid off, picked on an entirely random basis, and even the manager had no idea until the morning of. Me and one teammate were working together on this rather large and high impact project for about a month, we got it done ahead of time by thursday evening, and the team lead decided to celebrate it with an orgwide announcement of it and a demo the day after (friday). He sent out the email around 2am and went to sleep. We all woke up next morning, and that teammate of mine that I worked on that project with got laid off.
> “[…]Btw here's a rant about how much I hated my old team at my current job that flattens everyone to characters!"
I didn’t hate my old team, I actually liked the people I worked with a lot. I still maintain fairly close friendships with some of them. But through some game of thrones level incompetence and blunders from the leadership above (above the skip level), our manager got pushed out (and transferred to another team) and replaced with a person who had neither expertise nor was a good cultural fit.
One specific example of what i mean about culture fit here, since that term is often used to cover up some discriminatory behaviors (which was not even remotely the case here): he decided to introduce Agile for real to the team, with an assigned scrum master, sprints, asked us to take some Agile classes, and went hard on all the theatrics of it rather than having time to do real planning or actual work. We spent hours and hours each week on this. That was the only time I’ve seen or even heard of something like that at Google.
The team lead, who was the most senior person on the team at the time and pretty much held the team like glue, ended up getting fed up and transferring to another team a couple months later. Which was a major blow, because he was the one catching up on the planning and actually making sure things get done and properly (all while shielding the rest of the ICs on the team from the politics and most annoyances). After that, it all just snowballed in a complete disintegration. The most senior IC on the team at that point was an L4 who joined just 1 year before. Just last month, the last original member of the team from 1.5 years prior messaged me that he was leaving, and he indeed left.
To underline, I think the team and the people on it were great, and I am not complaining about them at all. I complain about the dysfunction of that particular org resulting in the entire team losing all of its original members from just 1.5 years before.
It really depends on what your current and wanted roles are... When it happened to me, I would have had to interview again because there were no other roles in my career ladder left in town.
Although I work for Google I don't have any hidden insights. I can think of some potential reasons but it's probably best for me to refrain from speculating about why layoffs have been handled they way they've been :)
Seems like a company-paid vacation and new digs, IYAM.
The stupidity of big corporate over-expansion of productive capacity is two fold: 1. in the execution of hiring too many people, and 2. not saving the jobs of good people in the haste to meet a particular cost target. OXPC-layoffs demonstrates a lack of leadership attention to business fundamentals and a blithe unconcern for the stability and security employees depend on for their lives.
As a nice utility for tons of different specific use cases? They absolutely do.
Personally the things I use mine for: setting a timer while cooking or doing other things that keep hands preoccupied, setting an alarm while in the bed, checking the weather while I am in the closet trying to figure out what to wear, turning lights on/off without getting up, controlling the music while in the shower, checking time without opening my eyes (in case of me suddenly waking up during the night and trying to figure out whether i should try going back to sleep or abandon the idea due to having to wake up in an hour anyway), checking if i have any calendar reminders, checking when the next train arrives at the closest subway station, and controlling smart lights at home.
All are fairly niche and definitely could be described as “i can live without it.” But it is really nice and helpful if you personally have any specific use cases that the assistants are good with.
