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Google Ruins the Assistant's Shopping List, Turns It Into a Big Google Express Ad (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Google Assistant, Google's voice assistant that powers the Google app on Android phones, tablets, and Google Home, has just gotten a major downgrade. In a move reminiscent of all the forced and user-hostile Google+ integrations, Google has gutted the Google Assistant's shopping list functionality in order to turn it into a big advertisement for Google's shopping site, Google Express. The shopping list has been a major feature of the Google Assistant. You can say "Add milk to my shopping list," and the Google Assistant would dutifully store this information somewhere. The shopping list used to live in Google Keep. Keep is Google's primary note-taking app, making it a natural home for the shopping list with lots of useful tools and management options. Now the shopping list lives in Google Express. Express is an online shopping site, and it has no business becoming a dedicated place to store a shopping list that probably has nothing to do with Google's online marketplace. Since Google Express is an online shopping site (and, again, has no business having a note-taking app grafted onto it), the move from Keep to Google Express means the Assistant's shopping list functionality loses the following features: Being able to reorder items with drag and drop; Reminders; Adding images to the shopping list; Adding voice recordings to the shopping list; Real time collaboration with other users (Express has sharing, but you can't see other people as they type -- you have to refresh.); Android Wear integration; Desktop keyboard shortcuts; Checkbox management: deleting all checked items, unchecking all items, hiding checkboxes. Alternatively, the move from Keep to Google Express means the Assistant shopping list gains the following features: Google Express advertising next to every list item; Google Express advertising at the bottom of the page.
News at 11
This is terrible news for the two people that use this service.
YOU are the product being sold. YOU are NOT a customer, you are a data source that Google on sells. EVERYTHING Google does is on the basis that they need more advert impressions and click throughs. The only thing that surprises me is that this was not done sooner.
Google Now/ Google Assistant or whatever they are calling it has been getting worse for a while now. It used to tell me about my commute. Not anymore. It used to tell me the weather on the home screen. Now I have to search for "weather". I should seriously just delete the thing.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Stop getting upset when they remind you.
See that "Preview" button?
What about Google's changes over the last five-ten years gave you any reason to think anything you liked from Google would stay as you liked it?
I think it is absolute madness to rely, or even get used to the continence of, any Google services.
I myself am guilty of breaking this rule in one huge way - I still use Waze. I know my own day of sorrow is coming. I just don't see how I can act surprised or upset when it arrives.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, were you relying on a google product again?
Google and Microsoft both have the problem that they have multiple nearly identical services within one company. They periodically retire one service and add another, inevitably losing or breaking some feature. Just recently, my phone lost what I think was "Google Assistant" and now it uses "Google Home" - which is the same thing with fewer features. For example, it used to work from any screen so I could tell it "OK Google, dial {phone number I see on the screen}" or "OK Google, search for {thing I see on screen}" It also can't identify songs. It even has a special message where it tells me that feature isn't supported yet. That was a strange response since that was the first indication I had that the program I was using had been replaced.
Piece of paper held onto the fridge with a magnet.
Works for me.
"Okay Google... What song is this?" - used to be a voice command to have Google turn on the phone's mic, record a snippet of audio, then report back what song it is. This was prior to Google Assistant, back in them good ol Google Now days. I never asked for GA, it was forced on my phone. This was a feature I used quite frequently to discover new music playing in various places while I traveled. Luckily, manually pressed the mic icon on the home screen reverts back to GN instead of GA. Its just stupid though having to press a button to activate GN now though, because GA took over the voice activation feature on the phone.
Everything else that is Google I don't touch. Exactly because of stuff like this. So as long as they don't mess with gmail, frankly I don't care.
You sure showed me! No one is using your malware laden software, you anti-Semite.
And for once, not a fault of the editors - that is a truly ridiculous collection of buzzwords and "services", but they seem necessary.
Google long ago gave up on it's core premise to "do no evil" and yet people still haven't caught on and bailed out. It is blatantly obvious how evil Google is, just google it. Anyone who disagrees should email me at my gmail account. For more information on how evil Google and Alphabet (a shell company Google created to hide more misdeeds) visit my YouTube channel and check out my videos. Now give me a minute, I need to check another tab in my Chrome browser. /sarcasam off
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In all seriousness though, the saying coined by Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight Rises seems to be holding true for Google: "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." From handing over the email of private citizens to the US government https://yro.slashdot.org/story... to upranking liberal sites on political topic searches https://news.slashdot.org/stor... to skewing auto complete of searches about Hillary Clinton pre election http://www.breitbart.com/tech/... there have been some mis-steps at Google lately.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Some people already talk informally about Googlezon, this is just more of the same. I understand that not many people actually use this, but the gesture is very worrying. Please go to your local baker (no, not the one inside the supermarket, inside the mall) before the only bread available is via an Amazon drone.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
What amazes me is people who are surprised when they ask Amazon's Alexa to "order more toilet roll" and then get some over-priced 2-ply rubbish. Alexia isn't there to help you buy toilet roll, it's there to force toilet roll vendors to pay Amazon whatever they demand to be the default option.
It's bad for everyone. In the past if you searched for "toilet roll" you would get a list, and all the slots on the first page of results were valuable. Now it's literally just one, the top spot, the default option when you ask your digital "assistant" to buy something.
It could of course backfire spectacularly. Maybe people get together to force the 1-ply sandpaper to the top of the list and thousands of angry and sore Alexa owners start complaining.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The first thing I do when I got a new phone is to turned off the "assistant" (Google Assistant, Cortana, Siri, Alexa ...). It's useless and it take bandwidth/battery/...
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
The whole summary reads like a millenial's "I'm entitled to free stuff the way I want it" rant. Get a clue, Google doesn't care what you want -- you are the product, not the customer.
So if you create a shopping list using google voice commands on my phone, it no longer goes to keep, it goes to google express. Any pontificating genius bother to test this story out. It comes from Ars Technica. all the comment section are like this one, idiot one liners.
Ive seen this used by older folks who cant remember something later, and just say into there phones what they want to note down. THey have a shortcut on thier computer bring up the notes.
So i tried it just now. I created a shopping list using voice. It went to google keep.
So sorry Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica. Your op-ed article is not correct. Go back and check again.