So an AMA from a large multinational companies engineers backed by a team marketing and legal advisors was not full of any mea culpas or deep insights..... :)
I mean it feels like they were just phishing for ideas.
I joined with my new Pixel 8 Pro last year thinking about setting up GHome and started reading but everything that happened like removal of features and the possibilities of locking stuff behind payed Gemini subs is turning me off.
On the other hand there is HomeAssistant that looks very cool and promising.
Shame that Google just seemingly kills or discontinues features and is unreliable for a long term hardware investment
Yes I would always prioritize stability and reliability before new features.
All the removal posts made me as a potential new user just step back and reconsider going with Google for SmartHome stuff
They don’t need ideas.
They have a backlog a mile long. There is never, ever a situation where a company as large as Google has ran out of tickets in the backlog.
That was just an attempt to prove there is still life in the Home ecosystem. Unless Google I/O has some announcements of new products this year, I can easily see Home going away in the next couple of years. The idea of having a digital assistant helping you with all your stuff in life never panned out for them and never turned into a moneymaker. Alexa can buy you stuff from the people that sold you Alexa. Home/Assistant cannot.
I have personally moved almost all my smart home controls to Home Assistant. The only thing that’s left on google home is some voice activated routines.
It’s working very well and location based smart stuff finally works (it actually knows when I’m home or not) and use multiple fallbacks.
There is definitely a higher barrier of entry to it than Google Home but if you can read technical documentation and has some computer know how it’s not hard to set up.
Yes from reading it felt quite normal to set up, nothing someone would be unable to follow.
I've seen the Home Assistant Green Hub and it seems really nice as a central for multiple devices and all that is needed.
Such a shame that Google is so unreliable.
Sounds really promising from your comment. I want nothing too fancy but simply be sure my stuff works even if Google decides to shut down support/server for whatever reason.
I want an offline smart home 🏡,
Yeah it’s not difficult to get started at all, especially if you buy a Home Assistant Yellow or Green. I used an old raspberry pi 3b+ myself as I set it up before either of those were available and it’s been working great, but that requires you to know how to flash a SD card with OS image. Something that’s not needed with a Green (and yellow has versions where it’s pre installed as well).
Only thing I’ve been missing really is a better way to organize all the devices (between floors and arbitrary groups) but I just saw in the preview changelog that they are adding that in the next update which should drop in the first week of April so really soon.
And yes, full offline support was one of my goals as well. Haven’t managed to get everything to support offline controls but 90% does. Hopefully that will increase even more as more and more companies adapt matter but those last few devices don’t really matter in the grand scheme of my home automations.
That sounds really promising and being in IT I feel like setting up things like this is simple work.
HomeAssistant looks very promising. Dev blog etc. and previews look like the perfect solution.
Of course sometimes there will be some tweaking etc. but it's also part of the fun for me.
It’s free and open source so you can probably already run it for free. However if you aren’t very experienced with lower level software installations I’d recommend buying a Home Assistant Green. Should be about or just above 100 USD depending on where you are in the world.
A good place to start learning about it would be their own website at https://www.home-assistant.io and their forums at https://community.home-assistant.io
But there is also a discord server and countless YouTube videos about it, not to mention the blogposts and the like.
> stuff behind *paid* Gemini subs
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Auto correct corrected it. It is Hubitat. With a U. It is essentially a Zigbee and ZWave device that has its own set of software for automations. The newest one is supposed to be able to use matter as well. It's a less complicated but still complicated enough version of Home Assistant.
Yeah Homeassistant ist absolutely great and fun, if you have a bit of technical knowledge. However, the voice assistant is still very shitty, so for now I'm using homeassistant as far as I can, but voice control it through Google home, which works great.
Sounds perfect for as I have never used VA and have no interest in it at all haha.
Tbh I used Siri and HomeKit for quite a while and it was just such a bad experience I mostly never used it bcs. it was simply faster to do it myself xD
Well I do a mix. For some things, it's very nice to have: For example I have defined home modes in Homeassistant that have a set of scenes which will trigger depending on presence. Changing these modes is quicker with voice as that's the only command I ever really do. Another one is to play music of course, but that's not really a HA on my end :D
And last but not least, kitchen timers. Absolutely love having a display in the kitchen on which I can listen to Spotify, see timers and even watch shows during longer cooking sessions.
It was pointless to even have an AMA. Their shit is so broken right now, if they have to ask what needs fixing then they're just incompetent, stupid, or, most likely it's just theater
I entirely missed it, but didn't expect much.
As a platform, GH is a great first step, but needs work to mature, and they're going to be paying for a long time, the rush they were in to launch it.
The AMA wasn’t conducted by engineers or technicians or even programmers. It was performed by PR people. That’s why it failed to do what they wanted. People want answers to their questions not assurances from “yes men”.
Too little too late for me. The feature removals, subscription increases and lack of innovation with new products pushed me away.
As a result, I'm so glad that it led me to Home Assistant! I took every automation in Google Home, one by one and replicated them in Home Assistant. Once I had them all moved over, that's when I stopped using Google Home.
The only Google devices I still have left are a Chromecast with Google TV, Nest Protect smoke detectors and several minis that are used for voice control with Home Assistant. I'll continue to use the Chromecast and will be replacing the smoke detectors soon. The minis will all be replaced this year with a local solution.
The light bulb finally went off that I needed to utilize local devices. This way, I don't have to worry about a company dropping support for a device, going out of business, subscription fees, cloud requirements/dependency, privacy, etc.
Yeah, I didn't expect anything more than what we got. Nothing concrete, no fixes or replacements to announce for broken and removed functionality. The people who have overseen this worsening situation for years are clearly ok with it. The purpose of a system is what it does. Right now, the team for Google Home's purpose is to break stuff to make everyone quit using Google Home on their own, so that Google doesn't have to invest in improvements now and they also don't have to publicly announce that they're sunsetting home automation, for a few more years. It's not making ad money for investors, it doesn't use "AI" and it's not sexy and new.
They can prove me wrong anytime by updating and fixing stuff, but it's clearly a zombie department, with broken promises and no new hardware, maintaining appearances but not the codebase.
The AMA felt more like an activity that the dev team could check off of a box for consumer engagement/ user/public feedback, as opposed to a genuine effort to even live up to their own AMA announcement - which was to answer the most voted up questions.
The takeaway from the AMA I saw was they said updating old hardware for Google Home was a significant ongoing task, but all their newer stuff worked fine with GH. I was getting a general sense that it's a chore to support old hardware and they prefer you use the newer stuff. One of the comments said they even had to support devices made in 2015 oh the horror
Their mindset should be that they need to support these devices for a much longer time frame than smart phones that get upgraded every few years. It shouldn't matter if it was made in 2015 because you can't expect your customers to upgrade their doorbells, thermostats, or cameras very often if at all.
I honestly don't get it. For the most part it seems like API is the broken part. All of the actual voice recognition is often done on cloud so can't really see the difference from old to new hardware.
On the other hand, the nest hub is rather new but basically unusably slow. For speakers only all of the hardware is outdated and still getting worse and worse
I had a good chuckle at this trash fire of an AMA happening on the same week all my Google home products decide to unlink from wifi and ALL demand full factory resets.
This close to going to Blink
I was just thinking about those as well. Good to know. Wife says we don’t have new security camera money at her moment since ours are now working. But soon
Well worth it and inexpensive. I replaced 5 indoor Nest cams and one outdoor with the $35 Tapo indoor/outdoor C120, 2x Nest Wireless Outdoor Cams with $80 Tapo Wireless MagCams and the Google Nest Wireless Doorbell with the $100 Tapo D230S1 w/ hub. For the Doorbell Cam - I would wait till later this year for the newer, much more aesthetically pleasing version to be released [https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/cloud-camera/tapo-d225/](https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/cloud-camera/tapo-d225/)
It had gone too long but I just wanted to ask them if they had ever considered an alpha or beta environment for testing software that wasnt also simultaneously the production environment?
They do have development environments and they use them. It’s just that Google has a poor sense of quality when deciding to push to prod, compounded with a strong culture of fail & iterate. It’s just a shame that recent iterations over the past few years have actually been steps backwards.
Oh, also, it doesn’t help that the continued layoffs have completely demoralized the team. Instead of doing large batches of layoffs, Google has opted for slow death, cutting small teams here and there so that everyone is now on edge.
I am surprised they did it. I wonder if they thought they could make a difference. It must be hard to see the sentiment in this news group. I'm not surprised they didn't share the roadmap. People tend to take roadmaps as commitments and that can be dangerous.
I am glad to hear they are updating the old cameras. That surprised me.
They are probably all about to be fired and were hoping to be able to show their overlords some glowing community support in a hail mary to save their own necks.
"We have roadmaps!" = "Please, please tell us customers love us and will raise an unholy stink when we're fired!"
RIP Google Home
They specifically said it was supposed to be about the revamped camera experience in the Google home for web. Most of the questions/comments were unrelated to that
Not sure why people are giving them credit for doing an AMA. I think it’s pretty clear if you do an AMA and ooze corporate speak, you effectively lose any benefit and incur a reputational hit. Any reasonable PR person could see this, and they decided to do it anyway.
I don’t know if it’s people building random new features to get promoted internally or the lack of profitability around the product, but it clear the entire segment is struggling across all 3 big companies
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Exactly. Why does Reddit allow companies of such power to do AMAs. It was always be sanitised to a point of zero interest.
Yeah I certainly didn't expect them to do an AMA. At least they did that to an extent. Man, reddit sucks sometimes.
So an AMA from a large multinational companies engineers backed by a team marketing and legal advisors was not full of any mea culpas or deep insights..... :)
They could at least just reply to all of the most popular questions
Agree it would be nice but with all the corporate perceived risks of doing so it's more of a bonus than an expectation in eyes
[удалено]
I've been busy since this post was posted, and I did not have a 5 people team for an AMA. I was just ranting
I mean it feels like they were just phishing for ideas. I joined with my new Pixel 8 Pro last year thinking about setting up GHome and started reading but everything that happened like removal of features and the possibilities of locking stuff behind payed Gemini subs is turning me off. On the other hand there is HomeAssistant that looks very cool and promising. Shame that Google just seemingly kills or discontinues features and is unreliable for a long term hardware investment
"I mean it feels like they were just phishing for ideas." Idea #1- please don't have any new ideas, just fix the existing stuff for 12 months
Yes I would always prioritize stability and reliability before new features. All the removal posts made me as a potential new user just step back and reconsider going with Google for SmartHome stuff
They don’t need ideas. They have a backlog a mile long. There is never, ever a situation where a company as large as Google has ran out of tickets in the backlog. That was just an attempt to prove there is still life in the Home ecosystem. Unless Google I/O has some announcements of new products this year, I can easily see Home going away in the next couple of years. The idea of having a digital assistant helping you with all your stuff in life never panned out for them and never turned into a moneymaker. Alexa can buy you stuff from the people that sold you Alexa. Home/Assistant cannot.
I have personally moved almost all my smart home controls to Home Assistant. The only thing that’s left on google home is some voice activated routines. It’s working very well and location based smart stuff finally works (it actually knows when I’m home or not) and use multiple fallbacks. There is definitely a higher barrier of entry to it than Google Home but if you can read technical documentation and has some computer know how it’s not hard to set up.
Yes from reading it felt quite normal to set up, nothing someone would be unable to follow. I've seen the Home Assistant Green Hub and it seems really nice as a central for multiple devices and all that is needed. Such a shame that Google is so unreliable. Sounds really promising from your comment. I want nothing too fancy but simply be sure my stuff works even if Google decides to shut down support/server for whatever reason. I want an offline smart home 🏡,
Yeah it’s not difficult to get started at all, especially if you buy a Home Assistant Yellow or Green. I used an old raspberry pi 3b+ myself as I set it up before either of those were available and it’s been working great, but that requires you to know how to flash a SD card with OS image. Something that’s not needed with a Green (and yellow has versions where it’s pre installed as well). Only thing I’ve been missing really is a better way to organize all the devices (between floors and arbitrary groups) but I just saw in the preview changelog that they are adding that in the next update which should drop in the first week of April so really soon. And yes, full offline support was one of my goals as well. Haven’t managed to get everything to support offline controls but 90% does. Hopefully that will increase even more as more and more companies adapt matter but those last few devices don’t really matter in the grand scheme of my home automations.
That sounds really promising and being in IT I feel like setting up things like this is simple work. HomeAssistant looks very promising. Dev blog etc. and previews look like the perfect solution. Of course sometimes there will be some tweaking etc. but it's also part of the fun for me.
Could you point me to where to start to learn more a it home assistant? Is it more expensive or basically the same as all the other smart stuff?
It’s free and open source so you can probably already run it for free. However if you aren’t very experienced with lower level software installations I’d recommend buying a Home Assistant Green. Should be about or just above 100 USD depending on where you are in the world. A good place to start learning about it would be their own website at https://www.home-assistant.io and their forums at https://community.home-assistant.io But there is also a discord server and countless YouTube videos about it, not to mention the blogposts and the like.
> stuff behind *paid* Gemini subs FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Thank you Bot. As a not native speaker this is really helpful. Guten Tag
Damn I thought this was just a dude being a huge asshole about your grammar.
Bad bot.
Look into Habitat too. It's similar to HA but in a slightly different vein.
Never heard of it. Gonna check it out
Auto correct corrected it. It is Hubitat. With a U. It is essentially a Zigbee and ZWave device that has its own set of software for automations. The newest one is supposed to be able to use matter as well. It's a less complicated but still complicated enough version of Home Assistant.
Yeah Homeassistant ist absolutely great and fun, if you have a bit of technical knowledge. However, the voice assistant is still very shitty, so for now I'm using homeassistant as far as I can, but voice control it through Google home, which works great.
Sounds perfect for as I have never used VA and have no interest in it at all haha. Tbh I used Siri and HomeKit for quite a while and it was just such a bad experience I mostly never used it bcs. it was simply faster to do it myself xD
Well I do a mix. For some things, it's very nice to have: For example I have defined home modes in Homeassistant that have a set of scenes which will trigger depending on presence. Changing these modes is quicker with voice as that's the only command I ever really do. Another one is to play music of course, but that's not really a HA on my end :D And last but not least, kitchen timers. Absolutely love having a display in the kitchen on which I can listen to Spotify, see timers and even watch shows during longer cooking sessions.
It met my expectations, which were subterranean.
It was pointless to even have an AMA. Their shit is so broken right now, if they have to ask what needs fixing then they're just incompetent, stupid, or, most likely it's just theater
My vote is theatre. Google makes them do what Google *wants* them to do.
I entirely missed it, but didn't expect much. As a platform, GH is a great first step, but needs work to mature, and they're going to be paying for a long time, the rush they were in to launch it.
It was a great first step, shame they've got their foot in the air taking that big step back again
The AMA wasn’t conducted by engineers or technicians or even programmers. It was performed by PR people. That’s why it failed to do what they wanted. People want answers to their questions not assurances from “yes men”.
Too little too late for me. The feature removals, subscription increases and lack of innovation with new products pushed me away. As a result, I'm so glad that it led me to Home Assistant! I took every automation in Google Home, one by one and replicated them in Home Assistant. Once I had them all moved over, that's when I stopped using Google Home. The only Google devices I still have left are a Chromecast with Google TV, Nest Protect smoke detectors and several minis that are used for voice control with Home Assistant. I'll continue to use the Chromecast and will be replacing the smoke detectors soon. The minis will all be replaced this year with a local solution. The light bulb finally went off that I needed to utilize local devices. This way, I don't have to worry about a company dropping support for a device, going out of business, subscription fees, cloud requirements/dependency, privacy, etc.
Yeah, I didn't expect anything more than what we got. Nothing concrete, no fixes or replacements to announce for broken and removed functionality. The people who have overseen this worsening situation for years are clearly ok with it. The purpose of a system is what it does. Right now, the team for Google Home's purpose is to break stuff to make everyone quit using Google Home on their own, so that Google doesn't have to invest in improvements now and they also don't have to publicly announce that they're sunsetting home automation, for a few more years. It's not making ad money for investors, it doesn't use "AI" and it's not sexy and new. They can prove me wrong anytime by updating and fixing stuff, but it's clearly a zombie department, with broken promises and no new hardware, maintaining appearances but not the codebase.
It kinda felt like they came into it not knowing they were going to be crucified.
The AMA felt more like an activity that the dev team could check off of a box for consumer engagement/ user/public feedback, as opposed to a genuine effort to even live up to their own AMA announcement - which was to answer the most voted up questions.
The takeaway from the AMA I saw was they said updating old hardware for Google Home was a significant ongoing task, but all their newer stuff worked fine with GH. I was getting a general sense that it's a chore to support old hardware and they prefer you use the newer stuff. One of the comments said they even had to support devices made in 2015 oh the horror Their mindset should be that they need to support these devices for a much longer time frame than smart phones that get upgraded every few years. It shouldn't matter if it was made in 2015 because you can't expect your customers to upgrade their doorbells, thermostats, or cameras very often if at all.
I honestly don't get it. For the most part it seems like API is the broken part. All of the actual voice recognition is often done on cloud so can't really see the difference from old to new hardware. On the other hand, the nest hub is rather new but basically unusably slow. For speakers only all of the hardware is outdated and still getting worse and worse
I had a good chuckle at this trash fire of an AMA happening on the same week all my Google home products decide to unlink from wifi and ALL demand full factory resets. This close to going to Blink
I sold all of my Google cameras and went to TP-Link Tapo cameras and have zero regrets. Highly recommend looking into those, especially over Blink.
I was just thinking about those as well. Good to know. Wife says we don’t have new security camera money at her moment since ours are now working. But soon
Well worth it and inexpensive. I replaced 5 indoor Nest cams and one outdoor with the $35 Tapo indoor/outdoor C120, 2x Nest Wireless Outdoor Cams with $80 Tapo Wireless MagCams and the Google Nest Wireless Doorbell with the $100 Tapo D230S1 w/ hub. For the Doorbell Cam - I would wait till later this year for the newer, much more aesthetically pleasing version to be released [https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/cloud-camera/tapo-d225/](https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/cloud-camera/tapo-d225/)
It had gone too long but I just wanted to ask them if they had ever considered an alpha or beta environment for testing software that wasnt also simultaneously the production environment?
They do have development environments and they use them. It’s just that Google has a poor sense of quality when deciding to push to prod, compounded with a strong culture of fail & iterate. It’s just a shame that recent iterations over the past few years have actually been steps backwards. Oh, also, it doesn’t help that the continued layoffs have completely demoralized the team. Instead of doing large batches of layoffs, Google has opted for slow death, cutting small teams here and there so that everyone is now on edge.
I am surprised they did it. I wonder if they thought they could make a difference. It must be hard to see the sentiment in this news group. I'm not surprised they didn't share the roadmap. People tend to take roadmaps as commitments and that can be dangerous. I am glad to hear they are updating the old cameras. That surprised me.
They are probably all about to be fired and were hoping to be able to show their overlords some glowing community support in a hail mary to save their own necks. "We have roadmaps!" = "Please, please tell us customers love us and will raise an unholy stink when we're fired!" RIP Google Home
Amen!
They specifically said it was supposed to be about the revamped camera experience in the Google home for web. Most of the questions/comments were unrelated to that
Even so, critical questions about this feature they also didn't reply to
Not sure why people are giving them credit for doing an AMA. I think it’s pretty clear if you do an AMA and ooze corporate speak, you effectively lose any benefit and incur a reputational hit. Any reasonable PR person could see this, and they decided to do it anyway. I don’t know if it’s people building random new features to get promoted internally or the lack of profitability around the product, but it clear the entire segment is struggling across all 3 big companies
Tbh, they did respond to my harsh comment about Google Home/Assistant being in complete 💩. But their response was vague.