If they kill Home. I’m done with Google products. I’m heavily integrated into nest and Google home. If they kill it further. I’m out.
If you really do swear them off, you will have dodged the next many bullets. They have made a solid pattern of killing off things we want. Generally, things we want don’t make them enough money.
I used to support the Home team. I saw them grow from nothing when I worked there. It’s pathetic what they are doing to everything.
It was never going to succeed because it doesn’t bring Google money.
So Google half baked a product, pushed it to the public whether they wanted it or not, and now it’s giving up on it replacing it with another half baked product nobody asked for…
Seems par for the course for Google
In all fairness, in the early days of Google Assistant it really was useful. It actually worked. Somehow in the last 5 years it plummeted. As in it stunningly and noticeably kept getting worse year after year.
I have been saying for years my phone was so much smarter in 2015. I don’t know what happened. I could rename it talk to it and it was responsive and did what was asked. Crazy.
what happened
Enshittification, LLM’s
Amazon Alexa has followed the same trajectory.
As has Siri.
It used to have all kinds of plugins, like Wolfram|Alpha, that let you do fun and silly things with it.
It’s simply gone downhill ever since.
The new Apple intelligence siri is arguably even worse. I tried asking it what the date would be next Tuesday, all I got back was “I don’t understand”.
Unintelligent Siri managed to crack that one without fault.
I have a Google smart speaker that I got as a freebie. I used to use it (>3 years ago) for timers, alarms, etc. and had few problems, I just stopped when I moved and didn’t set it up. I put them back up a few months ago and it sure seems worse to me. Always triggering on random conversations, or to dialog on TV. Anyway they are permanent residents of the closet now. They suck.
My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn’t have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I’d write, “Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room.” Of course then we’d have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we’d receive a reply saying, “Fine, turn on the light in the dining room.” The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.
We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.
Totally read that in Abe Simpsons voice
5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that “AI” is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year’s more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they’ve ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.
Don’t put extra internet connected microphones in your house.
I work for an un-named company that makes stuff that has google assistant on them. Initially we put hardware mutes and piped the microphones to physical hardware that monitored for wake up words locally and would then start piping the microphone data to the mother ship once it was heard. Google told us to stop that, only way to certify the product as compatible with Google Assistant was to pipe the raw microphone data to the mother ship 24/7. That was 5 years ago and I removed all devices from my house.
I s2g i will set my house on fire before i allow a unmodded google device in it
I just ditched my nest camera after 6ish years. Fuck the spys
I do wonder, is it possible to flash custom firmware onto the nest cameras? I don’t have any, but it would be a pity for alright hardware to go to waste.
Long time google assistant user, but them putting Gemini in it is what I’m afraid of, not the solution.
This is yet another “google released a product, didn’t know what to do with it, and made zero updates over the last decade, so now they’re killing it.” I don’t think they’ve ever fixed the bugs that existed the first day I bought mine. The speaker is handy for casting to, but also cast is a shitty non-open protocol.
Kinda just agree with the “everything in this space sucks” unfortunately.
Found the one in the picture in my office while I was cleaning. I just threw it away
I am shocked…shocked! that Google would let a product die on the vine and cease supporting it. Google assistant is dead, long live Gemini assistant!
I Still get their apps confused because of the stupid icon updates…or maybe I stupid and can’t learn new things.
Same, never had that issue with the old logos
It does take me several seconds to realize which one is which, so I sometimes go by their arrangement on my home screen. Avant-garde design, I guess.
Their new icons are so dumb. I think they thought people would get used to them but no, they’re still bad after several years.
Its about generating investor buzzwords and killing off beloved apps every 3-6 months.
You got to love the author of that article. If you want the lights to turn off and on normally, maybe people should use light switches. Those aren’t going to break due to software downgrades, those don’t require Gemini or internet connections.
And I understand, there are rare situations when throwing the internet at your home appliances can make sense for solving niche problems. Those situations definitely exist, but for almost everyone almost all of the time, but it’s pretty fucking easy to turn lights off and on.
Automated lighting based on day of week and weather is fun tho, then again I run it through home assistant lol
My rule for home automation is that it has to work in a low-tech way. I get Zigbee switches for certain things, but they work as just a light switch if everything is down. This is not true of Phillips Hue bulbs.
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Lights are one of the areas where I think automation is genuinely useful, but my rule with anything “Smart” is that it has to be able to run 100% locally.
It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.
and retire gracefully, where the device becomes open source and available to the community of owners who have invested in it.
You’re absolutely correct. I have few smart switches around the house and automations for yard lights and stuff like that are pretty nice to have but I still have the physical switch where the dumb switch was to interact with if the automations are down or I just want to override them. The ones I use even accept the same faceplate than traditional ones so there’s no change on anything unless you want to automate things.
Exactly this. I use Shelly relays in the switch boxes and use the physical switch as an input to the Shelly relay. I have a couple AliExpress zigbee relays too that work well.
The trick is with three/four way switches where the smart relay needs continuous power and to be physically located at the end of the chain where power is actually switched to the light or outlet. Took me a while to figure that out but an SPDT relay with 120V coil solves that. The problem is space: fitting the relay to provide continuous power to the smart relay and the smart relay itself into a standard junction box with a physical switch and all the usual mess of wiring is not easy.
I turn several lights on and off with a single command. The smart thermostat is the killer app for me though.
I have a fan plugged into a smart switch that I’ve set to turn off when I fade up my mic while doing my radio show. It’s the most glorious use of throwing the internet at a home appliance I’ve yet come up with.
We have smart switches set to turn off floor sitting electricals if the leak sensor picks up a flood in the basement brewery. It also alerts us through HA there’s a beernami
I have three lights that were wired to one switch. With smart bulbs, I can individually turn them on and off or dim them. No “dumb” solution exists for homes that were wired in a stupid way. This isn’t a niche application, it’s a common reality.
We have leak sensors in the basement brewery and sockets that help the hubs ADHD and anxiety (did i forget to turn X off? I shall check my phone), all running through a HA server. A mate has literally programmed in migraine protocols.
Automation ain’t bad. Capitalism is what the haters are angry at. Wish they’d go shit on that instead of stupid commentary about laziness.
You can get socket extensions where the bulb goes into it and then each extension is connected to a wall mount remote switch. No wifi needed and then you have a wall switch for each bulb.
Doesn’t fit into every light fixture though depends on the design.
Edit:
If Google assistant ends up dying this is the way I’ll be going with. I’ve already got HA up, I’m just using stuff that predates my HA setup.
These just dont need to be online. 90% of the use I have seen is timers and lights, like a half step above hello world.
There is a market for voice assistants that are local.
Hell, win Vista used to support it. I built a very very stupid jarvis years ago on a bored weekend with win VR and some zigbees
Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.
I did see something recently about local LLMs and voice input layers. The post made it seem very Jarvis like, think it may have been the voice used or the name.
Knowing nothing about tech other than I want my privacy I am hoping it is feasible for the common man
There’s a mode for voice control that is even friendly to a Raspi 4 or 5, but it’s very simplistic in control, basically a super lightweight speech to text trained only on device names and aliases. Think the speech to text in late 2000s through early 2010s non-smart phones.
Small models for faster-whisper will run on even my little Dell Micro i5-6500T that I have Home Assistant running on, it’s just a little bit slow, but it absolutely works and is usable speed! I run a larger model currently offloaded to my server, which has an RTX 2070 Super in it, but that’s to make it perform more like how Google used to a long time ago, and it’s unused power most of the time.
They’re trying to make it as accessible as possible for sure. There’s even options to use cloud STT and TTS (they even include it in the Home Assistant Cloud optional feature), but it’s definitely cool as hell to be able to talk to an open-source-design speaker and get a reply and control any switches or lights or even my thermostat and robo vacuum without needing the Internet to work. As long as my Wi-Fi and HA box are up, I’ve got options!
It has several modes. The most basic is speech to text, pattern match, then implement. It also has text to speak for feedback. No actual AI in the loop.
It’s also capable of tying to AI models in various ways. It’s mainly intended for question answering. Either general, or about your data.
I personally don’t trust a non-deterministic AI having direct control of my house, so the split is useful.
I just leave everything on all the time.
I assume this is going to arrive at the solution of “Upgrade to Gemini-supported devices today!” Yeah, no thanks. I wish I could get Home Assistant working with my nest minis.
I ended up picking up two of the Home Assistant Voice PE devices and I’ve been fairly happy with them. I even extended their firmware so I have a clock display on each with one being my bedroom alarm clock even. But even out of the box functionality, as long as you can either run faster-whisper on Home Assistant (or another box), or don’t mind their lighter device-control-only route, is totally solid.
Plus music streaming to them (with an external speaker attached via the 3.5mm jack) is pretty good!
They do work pretty well, I’m phasing out the Google homes in my house trying to go completely local, and the voice PEs are pretty good for voice control.
Get an ESP32, a temperature sensor, and 4x relay board and build your own with esphome!
If you pull the instructions for your thermostat, the wiring guide should tell you what each wire is for (because you can’t trust wire colors). From there it’s just wiring up the relays properly, getting the config built in esphome, and setting up a generic thermostat.
It sounds kinda daunting, but it’s really not super complex. The only gotchas too look out for are any of the relays that can’t be on when another relay is on. There’s a way to prevent that in esphome. I’m sure someone has made a guide on it by now. I would have made one if I had gotten my enclosure figured out before my 3D printer took a hiatus.
If you want just a temp sensor https://apolloautomation.com/products/temp-1
No need for this. A Z-Wave or Zigbee thermostat does the same thing.
Which one would you recommend?
I bought a Honeywell Z-Wave thermostat because I have a more complicated HVAC setup than the typical American home. It was one of the few I could find that was compliant with a home automation protocol that didn’t require something that announced its existence to the Internet. It’s been solidly reliable, replacing my dead Nest thermostat.
The thermostat:
Cool, I’ve come across this before. I have been looking for a more open thermostat, preferably esp32 based, that I can have good local control over. I have started to do the board layout for one with some air quality sensors built in.
If you don’t mind me asking whats more complicated about your hvac setup? Multistage? Heat pump? Multizone?
Not multistage, but it’s a heat pump with auxiliary heat. I have multiple zones controlled by dampers, too, soni have two of these thermostats.
Ahh, makes sense. Multizone is something I’ll probably end up doing in my house soon, thankfully all my ductwork is exposed in the basement which makes it easy. Thanks appreciate it, I’m going to try to get a prototype board spun in the next week or two, test it out for a bit, and then see if other people are interested in them too. Appreciate the info, I should consider being able to control dampers also.
I know it’s not the same, but my ecobee is fine and i think it avoids most mass surveillance stuff. They nuked the API but beetstat.io is cheap and nice.
The Google Nest Mini is a smart speaker, not the smart thermostat with a similar name.
I have it set up fine?
I imagine more as in using them for local voice. Without that, it’s still dependent on connecting HA to Google Home. And outside of a fairly expensive hardware replacement module it ends up being cheaper to go other routes.
Ahh I see. I’ve been meaning to try out building a local Assistant to replace my Google Homes with Home Assistant Voice for a while, just haven’t tried it out yet.
I don’t use Google assistant to control any other devices but the amount of stuff I ask 'hey Google’s to do over the last few years has gotten worse than when it first started. More often now I just play music to it via Bluetooth connection.
It’s also how randomly terrible it will be. There are days it couldn’t set timers only to work the next day. Or worse telling it stop timer would stop what was playing on a completely different device.
Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.
Depends on which one you have. If you buy their own smart speaker (Voice PE), which is designed to stay entirely local if you have the right hardware and software locally, and even has a hardware switch to temporarily disable the microphone, it’s pretty easy. And of you don’t have all that locally you need a paid subscription to use their cloud a little bit, but they won’t store anything. So still pretty easy.
I want to run my own voice processing service, ideally. Something that runs off of my home assistant server, would be cool if it made use of a Coral AI or similar.
You can. There are simple options, that only recognise predefined sentences, that even work on a Raspberry Pi, and at the other end of the spectrum you can host an LLM locally and chat with that if you have the right hardware (Coral isn’t powerful enough for that, you want a GPU with lots of VRAM). Obviously setting this up is more complicated, but there are a lot of options to do it your way.
IIRC it’s supposed to be getting better rapidly, as it’s an active focus of development for Home Assistant.
That said, I thought this seemed like a good guide on how to set it up as of 8 months ago. (I’m not necessarily a fan of that guy’s bombastic over-enthusiasm, but the info seems good.)
Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it’s completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
How is the speaker in that? I have some atoms and the speaker sucks. Thinking about buying a bunch of these Google devices and replacing the PCB but I’d rather save the time if something like this actually has good sound.
For music, it’s not great. For voice, it’s pretty good. It’s decently loud and legible. There’s no bass. The mics however are pretty good. As far as I’ve read, you can’t get the mics to work well unless they’re tuned for that speaker in physical placement and hardware/firmware. The HA speaker uses the same kind of DSP chip that makes it possible for it to hear well in worse than ideal conditions which makes speech recognition work so well. So yeah, if you don’t wanna faff with stuff and you don’t care about music, just get it. It’s got 3.5mm TRS out if you wanna hook a proper speaker for music. The DAC is probably not amazing for HiFi but should you want to hook up something like a JBL Charge, I imagine it should work. In fact I’m planning to do this in another room where I used to use a larger Google Nest speaker for music.
Does it work with music assistant in HA? Thanks for the response btw
It does! I have my bedroom one controlled through it and even showing up as a play target for Spotify Connect. I’ve got my speakers I was plugging into my phone to play music before, or into a Raspi briefly, plugged into the 3.5mm jack on that one.
My kitchen one I just leave as-is. I DID modify the ESPHome firmware on each, extending to add an OLED (I think) clock display that also shows remaining time for timers in numbers. I do really like the LED ring animation for timers built-in though, it’s pretty slick!
Not sure what a music assistant is. The speaker acts like a media player in Home Assistant. Actually now that I think about it, I don’t know how I’d play music on it. It doesn’t seem to do cast. 🤭
Probably 200$ of raspberry pi gear plus a few weekends messing around should net you something awesome that only catastrophically fails sometimes.
XD, I totally did this to make a smart alarm clock a couple years ago. That said it is completely stable, don’t think it has ever crashed or locked up on me, unlike the echo show it replaced that did so frequently (not to mention it occasionally updating in the middle of the night and waking me up at full brightness)
I’m curious about this as well. I think all the components are available, but nobody’s clicked them together yet.
My understanding is the software is the problem, I don’t understand why though.
Buh bye
