More Google Assistant Shutdowns: Third-Party Smart Displays Are Dead (arstechnica.com) 28
The Google Assistant continues to suffer at the hands of Google's product shutdowns. The latest products to die are third-party Google Assistant smart displays. From a report: "Google no longer provides software updates for these third-party Smart Displays: Lenovo Smart Display (7", 8" & 10"), JBL Link View and LG Xboom AI ThinQ WK9 Smart Display. This could impact the quality of video calls and meetings," said Google Duo said in a support page. We're pretty sure that announcement applies to every third-party Google Smart Display that has ever launched, so the product line is dead. Google's first-party smart displays, the Google Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max, aren't going anywhere and will now be the only options on the market.
Google Smart Displays put the Google Assistant on a screen and support all the same commands that a Google Assistant speaker like the Google Home or Nest Audio would; just shout "Hey Google," and it will attempt to recognize your command. The screen adds the ability to see a visual accompaniment to your search results, usually either some text, a photo slideshow, a timer, or media or smart home controls. The system is a touchscreen and has a really basic user interface that you can swipe around in without needing to talk to it.
Google Smart Displays put the Google Assistant on a screen and support all the same commands that a Google Assistant speaker like the Google Home or Nest Audio would; just shout "Hey Google," and it will attempt to recognize your command. The screen adds the ability to see a visual accompaniment to your search results, usually either some text, a photo slideshow, a timer, or media or smart home controls. The system is a touchscreen and has a really basic user interface that you can swipe around in without needing to talk to it.
But Google is such a reliable partner. (Score:4, Funny)
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To be fair are there any "Smart Displays" that people havent regretted owning through either shoddy or discontinued support? The entire concept always seemed hackneyed and more of companies jumping on a trend than actual feature complete products. Even after a couple years of talking about Alexa today it's an afterthought, a silly curiosity.
Hell the entire home automation ecosystem has been a muddled mess of products and protocols for decades. Maybe with Thread/Matter we finally, finally, might get the ty
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Hell the entire home automation ecosystem has been a muddled mess of products and protocols for decades.
I have a Google Home mini. I use it for streaming, as an alarm clock, and to ask for cooking conversions (imperial metric). That's it.
Re: But Google is such a reliable partner. (Score:2)
Did my own little automation with wizz devices. You can control them with UDP packets. Used a cheap esp32 as a controller. It switches on/off devices to save some power. Nobody at home? Wifi down, wall socket to tv-set off,
Oh well (Score:2)
And this is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Same... I got my first iDevices this year. I like the regular updates and support
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Same here. More support for the theory that Google is essentially just an advertising company. A neat side-line in search and, for some, email, but otherwise it behaves like a capricious child.
Anything other than search/email from Google seems like getting a plastic toy in a box of cereal. Possibly interesting to play with for a bit, but you know it'll never last.
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And maps. They are good at maps, mainly because there is a clear tie-in to advertising and collecting personal data.
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Now is actually a good time to buy that hardware. It's massively discounted, and you can root it and install your own software on it. Some of them make nice displays for controlling Home Assistant or showing your calendar and weather data.
I recently bought a high end air quality and CO2 monitor for about 1/5th the RRP. The manufacturer dropped support for the cloud service most people bought them to use with, so they are getting dumped in pretty much brand new condition on eBay. The manufacturer supports a
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Has the hacker community been able to replace the firmware with something that is open source friendly?
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No, but once you have the official firmware on there with the local API there isn't anything they can do to brick it later. Just cut it off from the internet entirely (good idea for security reasons anyway).
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I use an Android phone because I refuse to support "the walled garden of the fruit cult".
And I refuse to use Google Play; sideload baby! The only way to go!
And other "Google Services" that run on my phone...I try very hard to avoid using them.
The last change to my phone will be replacing the Android OS and it's Google underpinnings with some OS that is "free as in speech...or beer in the EU".
Google Duo is still around? (Score:2)
I thought it became Meet
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> I thought it became Meet
It's going to be replaced soon by Hangouts, then by Chat, and maybe then by Orkut.
Each time they can drop hardware and API support.
Another cloud victim (Score:3)
People may not remember, but a cloud is vapor. Vaporware doesn't equate to stability.
At anytime -- the provider can change terms and you won't know it until it impacts you or your business. The idea that we can replace locally based and locally running equipment for "something in the cloud", has always seemed a bit ludicrous to me. Even in the AI area, companies are finding they can't reserve
enough equipment to run their applications due to the vendor overselling capacity -- since when has that
NOT been a problem with large companies overselling capacity (cable, fiber, etc). And now have to worry about suppliers changing their ToS, that removes your local devices ability to work.
Sorry, but I want ability for my local devices to function w/o a cloud connection, as that too easily turns to vapor.
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Thats true but really for a lot of devices like this and for most people it's the only way they are going to do it because they simply don't have the time, skill or just pure wherewithall of motivation to do it "locally". Even just a file server, pretty hard to convinve someone to run a local fileserver, with webservices to share when they are out of town with up to date security, synchronization, etc etc. Most poeple are just fine with their Google Drives and iCloud setups and to be fair to them while th
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And how do you build a google display service to be cloud agnostic?
How many clouds make it easy to export your cloud data + SW to another cloud?
5 years would be okay... (Score:1)
The two "bigger" Lenovo displays mentioned came out in 2018 as did the LG XBoom model but that was November... the 7 inch was late 2019, that's a rather short support life. I could see 5 years being okay as a minimum...
Many businesses do a 5 years equipment refresh cycle, Google just made themselves a bad choice for that kind of thinking
Quite the timing (Score:1)
Re: Quite the timing (Score:2)
Google is not reliable (Score:3)
Don't rely on Google anything. The Google graveyard has become massive at this point.
https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
Good luck Ford (Score:3)
Old-school UNIX philosophy (Score:3)
This kind of thing is why I have an extremely dumb display / audio device, and I put whatever the hell I want into it from whatever box I like - which I can replace when it's obsoleted.
I don't want things that rely on software, updates and continuing manufacturer support.
I want things that do one job, do it well, and don't require software updates constantly to make that happen.
I'm not even sure I ever want more than one HDMI on a display device any more. If I want it to switch inputs, I want that to be under my control, not whatever the TV happens to allow me to do. All the display device has to do is take a signal and show it on the screen.
As someone who deploys dozens of triple-display USB-C setups with touch connectivity, driven from mobile devices of various models, I really can't be faffed to spend time debugging all the various issues that occur, and certainly not for some built-in voice assistant.
Gimme a dumb device any day and if I want a fancy assistant piece of junk, I'll bolt that on as an optional, replaceable extra in the form of a separate piece of hardware.
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