I was a heavy voice user of the old Google Assistant, as well as Google Home/Nest speakers, and have really grown to hate its Gemini based replacement on my phone. So often it screws up with basic commands that were intuitive and reliable on the old Assistant. It’s also slower and feels like a waste of resources to query an LLM for simple device and smart home commands
My brother used Google Home/Nest speakers with Google Assistant to automate his entire home. Everything from turning on lights, setting the heat/ac, turning on the TV, listening to music, controlling curtains and blinds etc. It was all based on voice commands. He also used it to make simple shopping lists.
Since it got turned into the LLM based one he’s been complaining non stop. It’s super slow and doesn’t understand what to do half of the time. Very simple voice commands will not be understood. Or it would understand perfectly, but instead of executing the command it would search on Google or something dumb like that.
The latest update has made it much much worse it seems, with the thing becoming even slower and basically unusable. The dream of a Star Trek like setup where you can talk to the computer is dead at the moment.