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.

I love that it has to repeat my command back to me before executing it, like shut up and do it already

It’s a terrible replacement for Assistant. It’s just the wrong tool for the job. Assistant was listening for commands and trying to turn those into actions. Gemini takes a second, misses the first half of the command, tries to figure out if I’m conversing or giving an instruction, and it’s hit or miss if it gets that right.

If I ask “what’s the weather today?” I have no idea if I’ll get a forecast, the definition of the word weather, or the song “what’s the weather like today” by the Kiboomers (which sounds like a cool indie band but in fact makes childrens early education songs).

Does anyone know an open source alternative for Android? Preferably something that works with home assistant.