Google Assistant tries to pull the "song name" out of anywhere instead of just identifying it by sound

u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 194 points –

At least I can use Shazam

34

Google assistant is useless. I can't rely on it when I'm driving.

It asked me to give a vote on how useful was the interaction. On the screen there was numbers from 1 to 5. I pressed 1 and it searched "1" on Google.

Ten years ago it wasn't dumb like this...

Lmao that's extremely accurate in my experience.

Sometimes I would ask for a destination "let's go to xyz" and it searched YouTube Music. How????

The only thing i use it for is: set an alarm for 10 minutes.
Everything else seems too much for it.

If you have an assistant device, Set a timer called cookies, or many other types of food, and you'll get a little jingle with it.

On the phone, you'll just get a timer.

once when driving the radio host was talking about the malvinas/falkland islands (500 km from argentina). Because i'm in europe and i was driving i was curious about the location, so i asked the assistant "where are the falkland islands"?). It set a FUCKING DRIVING ROUTE OF FIVE FUCKING DAYS, to go to over there AND BACK

it doesn't need a sophisticated AI to know that if i'm driving to work during a workday, i don't want to drive to the extreme end of south america and going back because i'm curious about the location...

I call this the "Having so many people with PhDs that you become stupid" effect. PhDs are great, people with PhDs are great, but at some point they all started inhaling their own farts and things started going downhill.

I know exactly what you mean. I use nest hub max for cooking recipes a lot. When I get to the final step there's a "done" button. I click it and Google says "I'm sorry I don't know how to help with that" like. What the fuck

Alexa got dumb too. I’ll ask her to turn on the fan and she’ll turn on the fan in another room but telling her to turn off the fan turns off the correct one. I ended up getting a HomePod. Siri may be basic but at least she knows what room she’s in.

Somehow the assistant manages to instantly turn on and respond any time I don't need it, but when I do, I have to repeat myself at least 10 times, for a basic question

Pretty much the reason I never used it on my last phone. Even went through the steps to have it recognize my voice better, and even when it hears it the first time there's a 1 second delay before it actually starts listening, which makes me further contemplate why I bothered.

Yeah, Assistant blows much of the time:

"Hey Google. What's two plus two?"

"Sorry, I don't understand. But I found something similar. Would you like to know what two plus two is?"

"Yes, dammit!"

"On the website Add A Couple of Numbers for the Hell of It, they say, two plus two is four. Would you like a little more context?"

"No!!!"

"Alright. I'm here to help."

Arrgh.

On pixel 2 and 3 this shit was amazing. I never had an issue with Google Assistant absolutely perfect assistant app. Then I got a samsung fold and, despite allegedly being the same app, it sucks all the donkey dick and balls. It's clearly not the same Assistant, and if it IS then google fucking ruined it.

It struggles recognizing the switch from wifi to data. Getting in my car and giving it commands to play music takes forever because it hangs up with the (now distant and poor) wifi

Commands to call people when I'm outside (walking dog, garden etc) suck for the same reason.

Voice to text is trash. It's always getting words wrong, mishearing requests, or putting words that I didn't fucking say. Half of my sentences start with "is" for some reason. "Is I need you to get dog food" like bruhhhh

I thought it was just because Google was punishing samsung users to push Pixels. This thread makes me feel vindicated. I wasnt wrong or mis-remembering with rose tinted glasses. It really is hot garbage lol

This has been happening to me on a Pixel 6 and it's annoying as hell. Their assistant has devolved

walking dog, garden etc

Your garden can walk? /j

I mean, yeah, if you're playing media, it's going to assume that's what you want to identify and will pull from that source, first. Why activate the mic if you don't need it to?

Wasn’t this a key feature on pixel? Continuous song identification?

It is, and I quite enjoy it.

Does it work like what OP is saying? Based on your response don’t think it is

Now Playing is a pixel exclusive feature that works in the background without triggering assistant and shows the currently playing song on the lock screen and always on display. It seems like OP is trying to trigger this feature from the foreground? Which I think would be a good feature but I doubt Google would let any phone use this cause profit. So I guess this is still fitting for mildly infuriating lol

OP is IMO quite clearly trying to tell google assistant on a not-necessarily-pixel device to identify the song, which should be a kinda standard feature for voice assistants.

It seems like you've misunderstood this feature of Google Assistant. Now Playing is a pixel exclusive feature that works in the background without triggering assistant and shows the currently playing song on the lock screen and always on display. It seems like OP is trying to trigger this feature from the foreground? Which I think would be a good feature but I doubt Google would let any phone use this cause profit. So I guess this is still fitting for mildly infuriating lol

fun fact, audio players don't typically use sound to get song titles, they use metadata in the file itself, which is how it also gets the artist name, album and track number, among other things