Google Says Assistant Will Be On a Billion Devices By the End of the Month, Up From Around 400 Million Devices Last Year (techcrunch.com) 68
Days after Amazon revealed that 100 million Alexa-enabled devices have been sold, Google said today that it expects the billionth device with its AI Assistant to be sold later this month. From a report: Ahead of CES this morning, Google dropped a little stat update: Google expects Assistant to be on 1 billion devices total by the end of this month. That's up from around 400M devices this time a year ago. Google first announced Assistant back in May of 2016. By October of that year, they'd rolled it out to the Pixel/Pixel XL; nowadays, it's on TVs, smart speakers, tablets, smart watches, and just about every new Android phone that hits the market.
Its so hit-and-miss (Score:1)
I used it on my phone for a few days. Mostly to text message people. It was really handy to be able to press a button & say "ok google, text message jim"
But it only seems to work about 1/2 the time. Sometimes itll actually text message jim, and other times it will bring up web search results for the query "text message jim" which is not nearly as useful.
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When was that? In 2016 I had issues like the web search results thing, but for at least the past year, the only problem I've had is sometimes it doesn't catch my comments because I have too many things going on on my phone (running too many apps/services on a 2 year old device). When I need it to work (driving) it's almost always been perfect.
It's also rather useful when I can't take my hands off of what I'm doing (cooking for example) to start timers or double check my memory on how many tablespoons are
Stats I'd like to see..... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. How mnay people know they have it installed?
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I use it quite a bit. Know a stat of one is pointless to mention but it is handy. If I need to call a business, I just squeeze the phone and say 'call such and such in my location' and it dials up the local number.
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It's useful in the car. If you decide to change destination, or need to make a detour, or want to see nearby chargers, you can just ask it. Sometimes it offers you alternative routes and you can just say yes or no.
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Google maps has done that for years. With voice control, if you want.
Or better: (Score:3)
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Siri is really easy to turn off in the iOS settings, and you're asked if you want to use it or not when setting up an iPhone for the first time. Google's assistant however is clearly intended to never be disabled. I tried to do so just the other day on a Nokia running Anroid Pie, and even after reading dozens of pages on how to disable it, I'm not confident it truly is off.
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1. How many people USE assistant? 2. How mnay people know they have it installed?
1 No
2 Yes
This is basically just a count of android devices.
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How many people USE assistant?
Dunno, but I've got two Google Minis that I assume use it. I bought one on a lark, expecting to give them out as stupid joke Christmas presents with "Big Brother is Watching You" wrapping paper that I made.
Within 3 days I was using it, in a week was actively using it for the time, weather, random info, and alarms. It's killer app for ME though is setting a reminder at a certain time -- where I don't have to find the phone and type and can spend 10 seconds to enter it without stopping what else I'm doing
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I went the other way.
I started with Hue bulbs, that felt really expensive at first but as time went on felt very much worth it (controlling color temperature and having my bedroom lights slowly turn on to wake me up was nice, I then added switches and lit the rest of the house), I got 2 home minis and a screen a week ago, and it's great.
I feel stupid talking to it, but it's really nice having an integrated control all over my house to listen to podcasts as I wander, check the temperature, control the temper
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Voice dialling works really well for me, but then again I don't have many friends so the number of possible names it has to match against is rather limited.
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These are fair points. If you have Alexa you almost certainly intentionally paid for it. Is google counting phones?
That said, Google seems to be winning this war and I've starting replacing Alexa around the house with Google devices.
There are some issues though. First the app is horrible, the installed services is per user so it becomes highly fragmented. For instance I can't go in and remove phillips hue (which are more universally and seemlessly controlled via my home automation hub which GA can also tal
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Also...
How many people use Alexa?
How many people know they have it installed?
Amazon pushed it out to all Kindle Fire tablets and it's always on, so it kills the fuck out of older tablets' battery life.
sheeple (Score:2)
George Orwell, 1984
Fine. Now how do I remote it? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can't remove it, as Google will not let you. Same happened on my Nexus devices, some forced update pushed that crap into my devices, even though they are unsupported from security patches point of view by Google.
Somehow they do have man power to port these spyware softwares to every Android OS version ever shipped, but their OS security updates end after two year of device launch.
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Would help to know what phone you have, then we might be able to guess how you keep randomly opening it.
One possibility is a long press of the home button. You can disable that unless your phone is particularly shitty.
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Anyway, I have a phone with Android 7.1.2, but other phones have the same issue. And yes, a long press of [Home] will bring it up, but there's no 'settings' there, and no disable. They want to force feed it to you, just like the removal of the phone jack and so many other things.
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Open the Google app. Click on "more". Open Settings. Click on Settings (again). Assistant tab. Scroll down and you will see your phone. Click that, then there is a master toggle to enable/disable Google Assistant on that device.
Ignore the "beware of the leopard" sign.
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It seems like it just got shuffled around and ended up there, probably because no-one working on it paid much attention to the usability of the off switch on their masterpiece.
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I DO NOT WANT TO TALK TO MY PHONE. Is that not clear enough ?
Have you considered telling your phone that you don't want to talk to it? ;)
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Settings
Applications (or Apps & Notifications)
Default Apps (or Advanced -> Default Apps)
(might have to select Assist & voice input)
Assist App
Change from Google to None
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Agreed, although I'd be ok with talking to my phone if the processing was done locally.
But, given that's not today's tech yet, I just switched to a phone with a custom android ROM. Didn't root and did install Play Store, but I left out all the annoying bits, such as Voice, Now, etc... Feels much better not to have to worry about that any more.
Does carry some risk and takes some technological know-how, but at this point I think it's worth the effort.
We need a new wiki.. (Score:1)
We are going to need a wiki to keep track of which devices do not include these "assistants" with microphones with software controlled by surveillance companies.
It's getting harder and harder to avoid.
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When did citizens stop giving a shit about all those who spilled blood and died protecting freedoms we casually cast away for someone else's profit?
September, 1993. [wikipedia.org]
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Luddites don't but you don't magically turn into a luddite just because there is some new thing you don't agree is advancement. New is not automatically better and believe it or not some people consider privacy concerns a showstopper.
Like I was given a choice? (Score:5, Interesting)
They push it out, no real way to turn off/delete, and claim its a successful product? How delusional are these idiots??
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Re: Like I was given a choice? (Score:1)
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Well, there is https://necunos.com/ [necunos.com]
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"You WERE given a choice in the free market economy, which makes alternatives available."
Yeah, a dumb phone or an Apple product which is even worse. How is that a choice? The choices we need aren't the ones which provide the best margins and profitability to companies. Once upon a time people running businesses actually cared about providing a good product at a fair price, now sociopaths stock pumping machines redefine fair price to mean whatever they can get someone to pay via any method they can get ruled
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Apples and Oranges (Score:2)
Most of those billion Google Assistant devices were software updates pushed by Google to existing Android devices. This can be better thought of as the count of Android devices, and a small percentage of Google Home devices. Most of the 100 million Alexa devices, on the other hand, are actual devices sold with Alexa enabled, many of which were purchased specifically for use with Alexa.
How Many People Wish They Could Remove It? (Score:2)
It is a continuing source of irritation. No, I don't want to turn on Google Assistant. If they'd let you remove it completely, I would.
Disable Google Assistant (Score:1)
First do this:
https://www.tech-recipes.com/r... [tech-recipes.com]
Android (at least my moto x4) will still respond to the "Ok Google" hotword and prompt you to set up Google Assistant. You probably don't want that, so go into Settings > Apps > Google > Permissions and uncheck the microphone permission.
Keep an eye on that; you know all of this runs afoul of their conversion strategy so they'll find an excuse to turn it back on or tie that permission to something you actually want to do.
Honestly, I don't know if Googl