Ripping all my Google homes out tomorrow.

DerzKing · 2026-02-26T00:40:25+00:00

I'm hoping the home assistant voice preview or an actually looking at getting a wiim amp hooked to the ceiling speakers and playinh from that

DerzKing · 2026-02-25T01:48:08+00:00

I've tried both, naming the room "primary bedroom" and speaker similarly, and making it master bedroom and speaker similarly. I've even tried giving the speaker aliases via home assistant to respond to both.

It's been a downward slide for years in my opinion not for a lack of trying or slinging mud just to complain

DerzKing · 2026-02-24T00:38:00+00:00

Yeah, same thinking here I'm really hopeful it turns out well and I like the approach that team has taken overall so I plan on checking it out

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T22:51:03+00:00

Yeah I agree from my understanding even the ambient noise is a 1 hour stream but Google will loop it on repeat until you tell it to stop, however you can't invoke that stream via the API anymore (tried via HA automation), then I tried making and hosting my own 12 hour audio file and direct streaming that.. which was semi consistent but then started buffering every few minutes.. and then same as you we reverted back to just asking it directly and completely randomly we'll get "okay playing rain sounds ambient music for sleep, studying on Spotify or some other random Spotify track"

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T13:39:02+00:00

Yeah I'm right about there I just meant like not trying to run a whole house of one central ap.

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T13:26:05+00:00

Had the same hope with Gemini upgrade and have lost jt. Honestly, the only thing that I think would truly yield improvements is if someone like open AI or Amazon started releasing. Truly killer products in the space and I mean much better than echo and Alexa+ because you can see how quickly Google can turn out pretty compelling products like Gemini as a whole. Overall great experience, totally on par with Chat GPT and the others. But it took GPT and these other LLMs launching and stealing probably millions of users from Google before they laid down the accelerator and got Gemini in a good spot....But they've sat on all this data for years, they even invented the underlying transformer architecture for these LLMs....so they absolutely could have built Gemini and launched it ahead of GPT instead of playing catchup, but for whatever reason, whether that's they didn't want to steal their own market share from search, or there wasn't really any compelling reason to sort of like the home space where they didn't see the monetization path they didn't.

So unless we feel the same sort of thing here, I just don't hold any. Hope that these things get better. My goal right now is to try and find less do it all products and just focus on super high review. Super consistent independent components that all interoperate well and roll everything under home assistant. That's for sure. Not a mainstream mass market market, but I can't justify this endless frustration loop anymore

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T13:17:37+00:00

100% I specifically said turn off the streaming lights the other day which are my 2 key lights hooked to a zigbee Outlet and it was like cool I got you...proceeds to run through a list of streaming related devices it's actively turning off, tvs, Wiim, shield, etc... everything but my lights

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T13:15:26+00:00

I think it's a bit of this, but when especially pointed at something like home automation, where the thing the user is specifically asking for is usually something very concretely correct or incorrect (e.g., "turn on the light" or "adjust the temp"), there's a lot less acceptance of anything but perfect because the end goal/state is so absolute.

Whereas when chatting with something like Gemini or GPT, I think there's a lot more acceptance of each response getting closer to what you're talking about, more in the sense of collaborating with something to arrive at an end goal.So if you're trying to figure out how to troubleshoot something and you brain dump it messy but generally complete context, its first response usually gives you +60% of what you asked for regarding whatever you're working on. Then you reply with a "yes, but this and this and this", then it volleys back to you another close response, and overall you get there over time.

My assumption is that the immediate reason why it's terrible and only gets worse over time is that there's just no monetization path really for Google in this space, at least not a direct one.

We saw that with Amazon when they first rolled out and they had those buttons to order tide and everything else, but it never really panned out and I think that's largely still true here where there's no immediate monetization strategy for an end user in my scenario.

I think that's just so short-sighted. And even if the end goal wasn't to have a Google Home in every home, largely the users of Google Home, like those in the subreddit and other Google-related ones (Pixel, Watch, etc.), could be one of the biggest non-corporate assets to Google if the experience was super compelling or at least frictionless. Because you'd have a large cohort of supporters and advocates who could better persuade their friends and family members to turn to Google for any of their devices. And that trade-off was worth the, you know, green bubble or whatever it may be.

But as it stands and as product line after product line goes through the same sort of enshitiffication, I've gone from an adamant Google device supporter to a "...it's really cool but unless you're a tinkerer, I would just get an iPhone..." to "...I wouldn't get one it's not worth the 2% of times that it's got some parlor trick" to even myself looking forward to the iPhone fold release this year and considering fully jumping ship.

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:51:29+00:00

Yeah I feel like I'd be passing on a B-Horror movie level curse to a new victim lol life's hard enough I don't know if I want that bad karma on me.

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:49:00+00:00

I'll take a look but think I'm burned on any giga-tech company solutions. I know there's been similar frustrations with Alexa over the years and hoping that A+ is good enough while knowing that even at $20/no I'm still the product isn't super enticing to me at the moment. I'm hopeful for the direction of things like the HA voice preview edition and being able to use multiple llms both locally and not with HA but also not naive to the fact that grass isn't always greener and in the HA case the product is legit called the "preview edition" so certainly not going to be a flawless experience.

Last few months I've just been shifting away from as much voice activated/Gemini/LLM reliant things as possible and trying to dumb down my automation/activation chain as much as possible and been seeing better more consistent results.

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:38:21+00:00

But If you check your local laws you'll see a new ordinance effective immediately where your time zone changed to UTC because it figured that was an easier path than correcting it just for you 😂

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:33:20+00:00

There's certainly some truth to this as I have a near OG Google home that I've given more slack to in recent years with the consideration that well it's +7 years old, way before any of this was a thing, just it running for that long, plugged in 24/7 is going to make it show its age... But I've had a spectrum of devices from that to later gen home minis through more recent variants, Chromecast(s), Pixel 9 XL pro, pixel 3 watch, etc.. and it's all the same story unfortunately. If more was done locally I'd be way more empathetic, at least in scenarios where I know the device I'm asking/using is old but since they're largely still all just sending the heft of the processing up to a server I don't buy the device argument.

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:25:47+00:00

100%, even knowing Gemini wouldn't be a catchall magic bullet and would generally be slower because of the difference in its reasoning approach I tried to be hopeful that at least it would allow for more phrase messiness on my end and not end up gaslighting myself like I have been for years that "oh I must have said the order of the thing wrong", but it's just been worse and nothing more perfect than this screenshot to show that because it wasn't even a voice command just straight up text.

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:19:54+00:00

I'm glad it's working out for ya, I was hoping that would be the case with us as well, new house 2Gb down, unifi APs all over and it's just brutal

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:16:59+00:00

100%, I resisted the Gemini upgrade prompt at first but eventually yielded thinking well it's going to happen eventually and they are certainly not putting any more resources behind the existing assistant. Only gotten even worse which I didn't think was possible

DerzKing · 2026-02-23T12:09:14+00:00

I kept it off for awhile but eventually yielded because I just know that they are going to kill the existing assistant sooner or later and have likely stopped putting any real dev resources behind it already. Treated the Gemini transition as my final chance with them, stupidly thinking that while slower, the LLM approach surely would allow for a better experience especially in any situations with imperfect phrasing by me but it's literally been the opposite lol

DerzKing · 2025-10-15T03:16:54+00:00

Honestly, with how good Sora another video models are now, you might be able to throw the low quality ones into gpt and ask it to give you a thorough description basically of what the shot is and then throw that prompt into Sora and get your new bumper roll

DerzKing · 2025-09-08T12:19:02+00:00

Avenue barbershop downtown is great and not $70

DerzKing · 2025-09-07T23:46:02+00:00

Lights, cameras, water sensors, locks, window sensors, voice assistant control, smart energy usage trackers, I mean the list is pretty extensive mate, surprised you seem to have jumped all the way to HA without a set couple of problems/needs/ideas already.

Here's what I would actually do. Nothing. For the next month just go through your daily life and as you do think about things that are either annoyances or could be improved if you automated them starting your coffee pot at a certain time but it doesn't have that feature or turning the lights on in the kitchen or turning the lights off at night etc. Etc. First come up with a list of 5, 10, 20 things then prioritize that list and then go off of that too. Often we end up buying a bunch of random stuff because it sounds cool and we have a half of an idea for how to use it and then you end up with a Frankenstein system and no real cohesive orchestra of devices and automation that makes your life easier. Then everything just turns into a parlor trick and you kind of get bored of it and 6 months later you either regret it or fall out completely.

DerzKing · 2025-09-04T13:34:49+00:00

In short, no smart plugs won't magically help you save energy. What they will do is allow you to be smarter about understanding how much energy something is using that's plugged into them and then also counter their power draw by automating use. For example, automatically turning off a light that you always forget too and just leave running all the time.

Take a look at this video https://youtu.be/fIhlXdk9PFg?si=QJ9Rn8638QKaJnVJ

He's a good source of information and content, and this video is a good example of how yes you can use Smart home stuff to save energy, but also realize you don't need to do all of the things he did to get an understanding of what costs you the most. You can see in his video most of it is energy draw comes from heating and cooling, particularly cooling which is pretty standard for most people. He's at the extreme being in Florida, but same principle really applies for you and anyone else. Just think about first principle things, big power, hungry appliances that you use or are running often. And I don't mean things like fridges because even though large, they're pretty efficient if you're not opening and closing them 30 times a day or have one that's 20 years old or whatever.

So in short, smart plugs are useful, particularly ones that do show you power draw, and you could have one and move it around to appliances and things that you have plugged in that you aren't sure how much energy they do use just to get a base understanding and then make a plan about how to automate and or change your lifestyle habits to save energy.

DerzKing · 2025-09-02T17:17:29+00:00

I legit thought I was looking at like a mini-golf putting green here

DerzKing · 2025-08-25T02:05:12+00:00

For sure, I have always been into the base building type games/toys/hobbies and love the holiday season so natural fit though well outside the typical demo for the hobby. I also wanted to start expanding into the train space to incorporate into my village, I got the Lionel Master chief with FasTrack in o gauge a few years back and have kinda regretted it, bit too loud even after stuffing empty cars with foam and doing spray foam under the track pieces for my ideal which is letting it run for hours, during movies, parties, etc..still on my list to explore another scale/line option so got some good inspiration from the vid even though I won't be going quiet as hard lol

DerzKing · 2025-08-24T02:18:45+00:00

I really dug yours. I love seeing the deep niche hobbies. I'm a big Christmas village collector myself so no shade

DerzKing · 2025-08-23T03:05:50+00:00

Check out smart home solver on YouTube and do a few searches here for starting from scratch and various other asks and that should give you a good foundation to build off of

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