Ask HN: What Happened to Google Home/Nest?

2 points

a year ago

I have noticed that Google Home's intelligence has been deteriorating over the years. For example, today I asked it "is Sweden part of the EU?" and it reproducibly responds "sorry, I didn't understand". I can see on my phone screen that it understood the words correctly.

So I wondered, have my expectations increased because of LLMs? But I looked up the original announcement from 8 years ago and it seems like it was meant to intelligently handle simple questions.

https://youtu.be/uM5AxrepDKY?t=380

Is Google dumbing it down to make Gemini seem smarter or neglecting it for some reason? Considering how hard Google are pushing Gemini across all of their other products, it seems incredible to me that Home/Nest has gone backward.

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