Google lays off hundreds in Assistant, hardware, engineering teams::undefined
And they announced this morning some pretty significant feature rollbacks: https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/13971691?visit_id=638405848924404696-2744922006&p=assistant_is_changing&rd=1
Calls made from speakers and Smart Displays will not show up with a caller ID unless you’re using Duo.
Is it possible to use Duo still? Google knows it discontinued/merged Duo with Google Meet nearly 18 months ago, right?
I appreciate how Google has replaced a bunch of the hands-free functionality with “just Google it, idiot.” Worsening their catalog of services will hopefully encourage people to step away from them entirely.
Accessing or managing your cookbook
I vividly remember the image of a 2010s housewife bent over a counter, hands covered in dough, asking the ever-present Google Assistant for the next step in her recipe.
That’s how they sold the Kitchen of the Future to us: Google would speak instructions aloud, rather than us illiterate women having to read the instructions off a handwritten 3x5 card.
RIP
I just don’t get how all of these “Smart” devices continue to get stupider. Why are they removing existing features or making them worse to use?
It’s gotten to the point where I’m currently working on a project to roll my own dumb smart display and speakers with a RPi, Magic Mirror, and a DAC/amp hat.
Google has no maintenance culture. Maintenance is simply not rewarded. Instead in order to get rewarded one needs to launch new things to show “impact”. At some point the only way to move forward is to deprecate some unmaintained features or the entire product.
Google pay and Google wallet
Take a look at home assistant to power the speech part of the display. They have done a lot the last year and even have wake words working.
I’m not going to bother with speech on it as I don’t really like talking to my devices. How assistant is definitely in consideration for the screen though if I don’t get magic mirror working to my liking.
The commute to work on smart screens going away is a headscratcher. How complicated could it be?
Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages.
You could never make calls. I remember trying to find my phone by asking Google to call it and it just saying “calling xyz”. Never rang, not while I was using a Google voice number, not on Google Fi, not on T-Mobile/mint.
Also, didn’t see anything about asking the assistant on the living room something and the device in the bedroom answering and vice-versa. Not sure how something so simple could be messed up. We kind of gave up on using it due to that, it isn’t even good enough to Google a question any longer.
Seems like mine magically started working one day for calling. Don’t need or want that function though.
Also most wear os phones do not support Google assistant since the new generation
How cool would it be if all the smart people working at massive tech companies like google actually were working in places where their efforts could improve the world instead of being swallowed up by the dumb dysfunctional politics of a too-big-to-fail company that hoovers up interesting ideas through acquisitions and unceremoniously strangles them.
I have read during the last layoffs that those employees got snatched up by small and mid sized companies
Jesus fucking Christ stop flooding the goddamn job market with geniuses. I can’t even hold down a job because I can’t solve shit fast enough, I don’t need to fight people better than me for basic ass jobs to feed my family
I’ve spent most of my life thinking I wasn’t good enough to be a Google engineer, but as I got older, I realized that they aren’t smarter, they just had a better resume. I don’t doubt that some of them are way smarter than me, but most of them are just smart, or at least domain smart.
The FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.
If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc… there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.
The Google staff just don’t think to look outside Google (after if Google hasn’t solved it no chance outsiders have) and so wrote something entirely from scratch.
Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great “Its by Google so it must be good!” Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.
The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren’t owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc…).
Every big company suffers from “not invented here” syndrome. It’s not always just because of arrogance. For example, as an engineer at Google, it can be less hassle to use a first-party library than a third-party one.
Also your list of examples is pretty bad. Guava is one I remember filling a real need when I worked at a small Java shop, and as I recall there was no widely used alternative to Protobuf when it came out. Gradle isn’t even from Google at all!
I actually researched my list, most the technologies were used internally for years and either publically released after better public alternatives had been adopted or it seems buzz reached me years after Google’s first release. So I am wrong.
Between 2012-2015 I used to consult on Apache Ivy projects (ideally moving them to Maven and purging the insanity people had written). As a result I would get called in when projects had dependency issues.
The biggest culprits were Guava/GSon, projects would often choose to use them (because Google) and then would discover a bug that had been fixed in a later patch release (e.g. they used 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 had the fix). However the reason they used 2.2.1 was because a library they needed did. Bumping up the version usually caused things to break.
The standard solution was to ask’why’ they needed Guava/GSon and everytime you would find they are usually some function found in one of the Apache Commons libraries. So I would pull down the commons library rewrite the bit (often they worked identically)
Fun side note in 2016-2017 I got called to consult on a lot of Gradle projects to fix the same kind of convoluted bespoke things people did with Apache Ivy. Ivy knew the Gradle ‘feautres’ were a massive headache in 2012 and told you to use Maven for those reasons. Ce La vie.
We tried using Protobuf in 2008 and it was worse than the Apache Axis for JSON conversion (which feels too harsh to say), similarly I had been using AMQP or Kafka for years and tried gRPC when it was released (google say 2016 but I am sure we tried in 2014) and it was worse in every metric I still don’t understand why it exists.
I was using Vaadin in 2011 and honestly thought GWT was released in 2012. I had to use it in 2014 and the workflow, compile time and look of GWT is just worse than Vaadin.
Anyone got a self hostable smart display and smart speaker setup? If I can build the devices myself, even better.
Look into Home Assistant.
