I Fired Google

complianceowll

This was so spot on I felt like standing up and yelling, "Yes! Exactly!"

itodd

> Then I went directly to Amazon and ordered an Alexa. Dear lord.

aliasxneo

I don't really use our Google Home devices, but my wife does. Ever since the "update" I've noticed now that Gemini likes to ask her 2-3 follow up questions after each query. The first might be something like, "Would you like to know more about <X>?" My wife would answer "No" and Gemini would respond like, "Is there anything else you would like to discuss on the subject of <X>?" It's gotten to the point where she will start yelling "cancel" and "stop" to get it to shut up.

rogerrogerr

This would be great if it wasn't written so breathlessly.

basisword

I don't understand how anyone bothers with these things. Other than timers in the kitchen (where hands might be greasy) I've always found it faster to just pull out my phone and Google it. P.S. I hope that dehydration/headaches question was a poorly chosen example and not something someone over the age of 5 seriously needs an answer to.

orn

And her site spams you with soo many ads, I had to shut it down

freediddy

Sorry but this page and site have the most obnoxious number of ads on almost any page I've ever seen. After reading a couple of paragraphs I closed the window, no content is worth subjecting myself to that many ads and trying to navigate which is real content and which isn't.

elbasti

I have an android phone which means I use android auto fairly often. The sheer quality destruction it's experienced since transitioning to Gemini is incredible. I experience this mostly when asking for music. Before gemini, mistakes were common but deterministic. It was easy to understand where the query had gone wrong and so how to fix it. Example: "Hey google, play Blackstar " (Plays the album blackstar by David Bowie, not what I wanted) "Hey google, play "Blackstar by Radiohead" (Plays the right thing). Now: "Hey Google, play Blackstar by Radiohead" can result in playing... something vaguely semantically related with no way to course correct. In this exact instance (happened yesterday!) it played an album by the hip hop due Black Star . I will admit that there are some superpowers hidden in Gemini that were not present in the previous AI assistant. I recently discovered that Gemini can manipulate the navigation app, and a prompt like "Mute alerts" works, which is kind of cool. However like OP said, it's incredibly verbose, which is super annoying.

hylaride

The only things these "smart" speakers are good for is timers, adding to lists (especially grocery lists in the kitchen), and playing music. And even then they often stutter...

zf00002

Stopped after repeating the false claim that bmw charges a subscription for heated seats.

Hugsbox

I Fired theartofdoingstuff.com for extremely obnoxious ads - particularly the "Would you like to save this stuff?" one that greys out the rest of the article you're trying to read to... checks notes ... ask if you want the article emailed to you? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

chymerax

The whole upgrade thing is stupid. For years I was able to tell my phone in the car: "Play this song on spotify" and it did it. Not any more. "Ok google! Set a timer for 20 minutes." -> "Sorry Bob, I don't have permission to do that". "Ok google, navigate home" -> "Navigating to Store@Home24!" (half a country away). I agree. I wasn't smart but it was useful in certain cases. Now it's just lobotomized.

bighead1

> Nobody asked for cars that require IT support and 3 sub-menus to lower the air conditioning. (Screens are cheaper to install than buttons and knobs.) perhaps, but people did ask for cheaper cars.

pipeline_peak

Never understood why anyone would use Google Home or Amazon Echo when we all have phones. A DSLR camera is better than a phones camera, a voice assisting device seems replaceable however.

speak_plainly

The quality of Gemini varies so much throughout the day, the week and the month that it’s hard to rely on it for anything. It feels like Google is trying to throttle costs but has completely missed the mark.

trimethylpurine

Hey Google, write an article called "I Fired Google." (Although, based on the tone, I think it's Grok.)

philipallstar

> I don't need a four-minute explanation. I don't need context. I don't need a balanced discussion that considers multiple viewpoints and concludes with a summary. Karen, you mean you don't want those things. Stop confusing want and need. - The Manager.

fiatjaf

Apparently you haven't fired Cloudflare, since this website forces me to go through a captcha in order to read (and I'm not even using a VPN or Tor).

pwython

I had Claude whip up a local solution for me using Gemma 4 26b-a4b on my Mac and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It can do web search (valyu), file reading -- I have business & personal context stored in many markdown files -- weather, Apple reminders, and has cross-session memory. Streamline but capable agent that has been pieced together over a few weeks after using Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern, with bits of Hermes logic. Orpheus-TTS streams the spoken reply back with the first word usually landing in half a second. Voice input is openWakeWord for the wake word plus faster-whisper for speech-to-text, all on-device. I can run it straight on the Mac but I use it with the pi satellite and a cheap USB speakerphone (ConfCall MS13B). You can barge in by just talking over it rather than having to say the wake word again. Pretty handy Google Home replacement.

VBprogrammer

I wondered how long it would be until someone took the obvious step of wiring a voice assistant up to a full blown LLM model. Seems like the thing I failed to consider was whether that was actually a good idea.