Google’s version of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana is Google Assistant. It was originally an extension of Google Now, designed to be personal while expanding on Google’s existing “OK Google” voice controls. Watch this video to know how the improved Google Assistant can help you.
In this video, Peter discusses how Google Assistant can help you and if it’s worth to get one.
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Google Assistant is natively available on most reasonably current Android devices. If you want to make your home ‘smarter’ then you might consider grabbing a Google Home device. We just need to remember that none of the digital assistants available today is perfect. And even after years of interaction with people, they all have some issues to address.
Is Google Assistant working and helpful for you? Let us know your thoughts by dropping a comment below!
Transcription:
Good day, it’s Peter Moriarty here covering off my opinions of the Google Assistant from using it since launch.
If you’ve been following us for a while, you would know I recorded a video a couple of years ago on Google’s initial launch of the Google Home and that was really the first hard launch of hardware to houses the Google Assistant and turn it into something that actually came into your home and became useful.
There’s been a lot of additions, a lot of changes, and to be honest, some things that are still bloody terrible about the Assistant since then. And I want to cover some of those things off and give you a bit of an update on my thoughts. We’ve had customers who have made use of the Assistant and used it, where there are some customers who’ve used it and then gone ahead and returned it again. And I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. And to be honest, I’ve procrastinated making this video because my position and opinion on it really is changing sometimes week to week.
So first off, let’s cover some of the things I am actually using the system for. Since I got it, it’s been perfect for things like timers, reminders, setting alarm and all of the basic kinds of things that the Assistant is grate for. You can just yell at it in the kitchen or the lounge room to set timers and it’s going to help you with cooking with, running around the house or the kind of thing that you would normally go ahead and pick up a phone for but you don’t want to mess around with having to touch something. It’s great if you’re putting something in the oven and you want to yell and set a timer, all of those things, it’s grateful.
But that’s not really what the Assistant is for. What was promised to us was full automation of your home, like a Java-style, have everything done for you. And I’ve experimented with a lot of different apps and solutions and even a lot of hardware as well to see where I might be able to get it to fit. So the integrations I’m most commonly using right now are actually switches for Waymo. Now these are made by Belkin or I think maybe Belkin acquired them. But the Waymo switches allow me to switch on and off lights, switch on and off hardware like my stereo, I use it for a computer that I’ve got as well and basically it’s like hard pushing in or unplugging something.
Now, these are useful to turn something like the stereo behind me on, but the thing that I find is even when I switch it on with the Waymo switch, I still have to then go and press the button to take the stereo out of standby to switch it on so it’s not truly switching the device on. It’s great for switching it off, but switching it on it doesn’t really do exactly what I wanted to do.
Same thing with a heater. I have a heater in my office and I can switch the heater off by having that switched off, but when it’s plugged back in, the heater doesn’t automatically come on. Now if you’ve got a more simple device, like a lamp or maybe a fan, then you can leave the on switch on. But anything digital that has a standby mode doesn’t really work. And I first came up against this when I had it plugged into my TV. I want it to be able to turn the TV off, but then also turned the TV back on. And what was happening was the TV would switch on into standby mode. So I’d yell at Google to turn on the TV and then I’d go and find the remote to turn the TV on a second time.
So that’s just not really useful. It half does what I want it to do. Now while we’re talking about external devices, yes I’ve been able to use the switches to turn on and off some lights, but the downlights in my house don’t have any automation built into them. And it’s not really as simple as just changing our globe because as you can see, they’re halogen downlights and they’re dimmable. So for me to actually integrate the Google assistant into each one of these, I would have to either rip out each one of the lights and switch them over to smart systems or I would have to at a minimum rip off the PowerPoint, sorry, the switches and get them re plugged into smart switches. Now some of the smart switches online really vary in quality. And honestly, the whole setup was just going to be too much of a hassle for me to bother with.
I also don’t know how long I might be in this place. And So I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to rip out every single light switch in the house just to get the smart functionality. So, for now, I’m stuck with really basic switch on switch off lights and it’s not the end of the world, but it’s not quite what Google promised.
So the one thing I’m definitely using Google assistant for is music. And I was previously a big fan of Sonos. I had Sonos right through the whole house. You can even see still here, the Sonos beam, that’s the last bit of Sonos hardware that I have left around my place. You don’t even have to use your phone to pair it or anything. You can just basically get Sonos to play stuff. It’s really, really cool. But, but it wasn’t all that great on the integrations.
Google have only just announced that they have started working with Sonos in the last few months. It first rolled out to the US, it finally came to Australia and I held out with all of my Sonos skier so I could speak to Google and have Google control the music on my Sonos. And Sonos even integrated the Google Assistant into some of their hardware. So I can talk to the Sonos hardware if it has a microphone like the Sonos beam that you’re seeing right behind me, and have that actually do commands for my Google stuff.
But both of those experiences just weren’t that great. When I was trying to control the Sonos from the Assistant, from my other Google assistants, like my Google Home, it was pretty damn clunky. And when I tried to use the Google Assistant on the Sonos, it was difficult to differentiate if I wanted the Sonos to play music or if I wanted something to be displayed on my TV, like the weather or a YouTube video, and it just turned into a mess.
What I found was switching to Google Audio Chromecasts and plugging each one of those into individual stereos around my home. Like the stereo that I have sitting behind me was a much better experience than bothering with all the Sonos [inaudible 00:05:42]. Now not only that, the Sonos [inaudible 00:05:44] is quite expensive. We’re talking a thousand dollars for soundbar. It was upwards of six, $700 just for one speaker to cover off a room. And I prefer to buy quality Hi-Fi gear and plug in a Google Chromecast Audio.
Only problem is Google have discontinued the Chromecast audios. The only Chromecast available now are ones that you plug into the TV. You can put in an HDMI through the TV and then pass through from the TV back out to a stereo. But you’re going to potentially have some audio degradation with that. And I’ve tested it. There is definitely a quality difference.
So if you’re interested in playing music, right now the best solution, it’s not a great one, but the quality is great and multi-room is great. I’ve got Google Homes in every room, and in each one of those rooms where there’s a stereo, I’ve got a Google Chromecast Audio. Now you can’t buy them anymore. So you can just grab one of those on eBay, which is what I’ve been doing, and that lets you get each one of your stereos connected and in sync with your audio in every room. But don’t let that convince you that Google’s multi-room audio solution is a bad idea.
I still thoroughly recommend this over Sonos. It’s easier to set up and something like Google Home is big enough for a bathroom to be able to play music everywhere. Now Google Home is a couple of hundred bucks for the original version and that can fill a room like a bathroom where you don’t have to spend four or $500 or more on a Sonos system just for that room.
You can see here that each positive comes with it a few caveats and a few things that are still janky about this. I haven’t even got to the bad stuff yet. These are still the positives. Now, one of the things that I’ve used consistently, and this has probably been the most useful task right across the whole time that I’ve owned the Google Home, is Google’s shopping list. I can say the trigger word. I can ask people to add something to my shopping list. Bang! It’s done.
Now this is all good, but also has something weird to it. There’s no shopping list app. Google just hasn’t made one and they haven’t integrated this with Google Keep either. And so anytime I go to the shops and I want to open my Google shopping list, I’ve got to open a browser and then open shoppinglist.google.com, I bet you didn’t even know it existed. I didn’t either until I wondered where my shopping list items were going because they weren’t showing up in Google Keep.
So let’s talk about the stuff that’s not working. Now, G Suite integration for the Assistant sucks. It’s so bad. It’s still so bad. And I don’t know how Google have got it so wrong for business owners that are using G Suite, who are Google’s biggest supporters, we’re the ones paying money for adverts. We’re the ones paying money for the Google services. Yes, I understand Google, you are a consumer company and your Gmail and your Assistant services are consumer-focused, but please, please, please fix the G Suite integration.
Now the Google Calendar was supposed to work with the Assistant years ago and it just didn’t work inside of G Suite. And then it started working when Google announced, “Hey, we’re going to make the Calendar work inside of G Suite.” Now what’s this, “Hey Google, what’s on my calendar for today?” [inaudible 00:08:41]
Oh wait, what’s that? It’s still not working. We are years down the line and I still don’t have a working G Suite calendar with my Google Assistant. For some reason it happens to work in the US for some customers, admittedly, but no, it doesn’t work for me. Maybe I’m just special or maybe all of my other Australian friends who told me it doesn’t work for them either, well, maybe there’s something a little bit more than that going on. So Google, please fix your G Suite support.
Now, until recently, Google’s had a great integration with the Tasks feature. I’ve really been trying hard to use Google Tasks. I use Asana for less shared tasks across our company, but if I want to actually work with Google on an individual basis for my individual tasks, I’ve been testing out Google Tasks. There’s a great app for iOS, there’s a great app for Android, works nicely inside of Gmail and inside the Calendar, and until a couple of weeks ago it also worked fine using the Google Assistant. But do you think that works for me now? “Hey Google, add a task.” [inaudible 00:09:39]
Yet again, we’re stuck.
The last issue that I have with Google is the inconsistencies between the different devices. Now sometimes I’ll be in the kitchen and I’ll want to ask the stereo to do something and I will ask something of my Google Home and what will happen is my phone will light up and the Assistant on my phone will try and respond to the interaction, but it doesn’t always work on my phone because some commands don’t work on the phone. That worked on the Google Home, but Google doesn’t know that I was trying to talk to the Google Home and not the Google Assistant on my phone.
And so what I’ve had to do is I’ve actually had to switch off the Assistant on my phone. I found that it got triggered at random times and it was, just to be honest, bloody annoying. The other thing is that if the phone was triggered, it wouldn’t always hear what I was saying because the microphone quality isn’t as great as the dedicated Google Home device’s.
And so I was yelling across the room to try and get to the Google Home when my Google phone would then pick me up and the Google Home would stop listening because the phone was listening to me. And it’s just been such a tough experience where Google was supposed to be this one assistant which was supposed to be easy for everything.
So you can see here, it’s clear, I have really truly love and hate relationship with Google Assistant right now. It’s been awesome, but like 75% awesome. And so if you want to ask my true recommendation on whether or not you should have Google Assistant in your home? Yes you should. It’s great. It saves time. It makes it easy. Do you want to go crazy and buy one and put it in every single room? I don’t know if it’s that useful for you right now.
Does it work for you when connected to a Chromecast on the TV and you want to play YouTube videos and that kind of stuff? Yeah, it’s pretty groovy. If you want to ask it for the weather, it does a pretty good job at doing that. If you want to set a kitchen timer, it does a good job of that. Is it as good as other solutions out there on the market? Well, I’m not sure, you have to be the judge of that. The inevitable question that I’m going to get is, well, “Why don’t you just switch to something like Amazon Alexa and use that?” Well that has drawbacks as well. And to be honest, I want to love Google. I want to use Google, I want this to work, but Google, you’re making it damn hard.
So I’d love to know your thoughts, your comments. Is Google Home working for you? Is the Assistant trash or is it actually something useful in your life? Drop your comments down below and I look forward to catching you in the next one. Of course, if you need any help in the Google world with your G Suite, with your business applications, we are primarily a business channel, but we like to cover off the Google consumer stuff from time to time. Then get in touch with us, head along to ITGENIUS.COM and we’ll be very happy to help out with any business needs you have in the Google world. Till next time, cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
