Google a company that we've all come to love and hate at the same time I personally like Google a lot they have a lot of awesome products that they make not to mention the fact that they make it possible for me to pay my bills while making videos complaining about them but sometimes google does things that really just makes no sense at all and it can be quite frustrating whether it's abandoning truly good projects or releasing unfinished products or just making stupid changes to youtube mmm the
primary example in this case is Google home now this is actually a really cool device with some neat features you know it can play music control smart home devices keep a shopping list lots of stuff you would expect from a virtual assistant but you know one thing it can't do even months after release set
reminders what Google what are you smoking where you wouldn't put this incredibly basic feature into your flagship product this is a product they're pushing so hard they've even set up physical stores like in New York where they have a bunch of these Google home things on display if there's any feature I would expect in a virtual assistant.
primary example in this case is Google home now this is actually a really cool device with some neat features you know it can play music control smart home devices keep a shopping list lots of stuff you would expect from a virtual assistant but you know one thing it can't do even months after release set
reminders what Google what are you smoking where you wouldn't put this incredibly basic feature into your flagship product this is a product they're pushing so hard they've even set up physical stores like in New York where they have a bunch of these Google home things on display if there's any feature I would expect in a virtual assistant.
It's the ability to set reminders i mean how easy is that and it's probably one of the first features that
any average consumer would try but you know what it gets worse because the google assistant on your phone can set reminders no problem so we know that it can be done they just decided to not put it in google home for some reason but here's the worst part of it all and it's actually quite hilarious once you get past the frustration of it is that if you put both your phone and google home within hearing range google home will always take precedence even if it can't do what you're asking so if you use the wake word and ask your phone to set a reminder but you're in the presence of google home your phone will say answering on another device and then home will say oh yeah i can't do that therefore you really have two options you can either not use the wake word at all and just use the home button on your
phone to bring up the assistant or you can try and talk quietly hoping google home won't hear you even more stupid is that you can't customize the wake word in any way.
any average consumer would try but you know what it gets worse because the google assistant on your phone can set reminders no problem so we know that it can be done they just decided to not put it in google home for some reason but here's the worst part of it all and it's actually quite hilarious once you get past the frustration of it is that if you put both your phone and google home within hearing range google home will always take precedence even if it can't do what you're asking so if you use the wake word and ask your phone to set a reminder but you're in the presence of google home your phone will say answering on another device and then home will say oh yeah i can't do that therefore you really have two options you can either not use the wake word at all and just use the home button on your
phone to bring up the assistant or you can try and talk quietly hoping google home won't hear you even more stupid is that you can't customize the wake word in any way.
Which would pretty much solve this problem with the phone google assistant you can begin the wake word only with saying ok but with google home you can either say ok or hey which i think is easier but wouldn't it make more sense to have the extra wake word on your phone in case you specifically wanted it to answer the question why does the home need two if it's going to take over anyway in either case there should at least be a way to choose which device can be awoken with which words but
there's not which is so stupid google now i'll play devil's advocate for a second because i have heard some counter arguments to this that sort of makes sense but not really if you think about
it for two more seconds it seems that what Google is thinking is that with Google home you can't set reminders because there might be more than one person in the house so how can it set reminders if it can't recognize who is setting the reminder they need some sort of voice recognition or something their
point is basically look creating reminders is just too hard the technology just isn't there yet to this.
there's not which is so stupid google now i'll play devil's advocate for a second because i have heard some counter arguments to this that sort of makes sense but not really if you think about
it for two more seconds it seems that what Google is thinking is that with Google home you can't set reminders because there might be more than one person in the house so how can it set reminders if it can't recognize who is setting the reminder they need some sort of voice recognition or something their
point is basically look creating reminders is just too hard the technology just isn't there yet to this.
I respond you are stupid here's an idea that took me two minutes to come up with if you need to figure out who the reminders for just have the user say remind Joe to do this or that or remind Bob to wash the car then it would just remind that person on their phone when the time comes plus there should be an
option in the settings for I'm the only person who lives here so it just gives you all the reminders why not that truly revolutionary stuff I know the other argument I've heard is maybe someone would set a reminder for themselves and then someone else in the house might use.
option in the settings for I'm the only person who lives here so it just gives you all the reminders why not that truly revolutionary stuff I know the other argument I've heard is maybe someone would set a reminder for themselves and then someone else in the house might use.
Google home to cancel other people's appointments okay that's a legitimate concern except they could probably solve that problem by making it so I don't know you can't do that either require you to cancel reminders on your phone or just make them confirm the cancellation on the phone I mean Google is a 500 billion dollar company I'm sure they can figure this one out though Google isn't all bad obviously most of their stuff is great I mean take the pixel phone for example it's actually a good phone of course they did leave out a bunch of major features like waterproofing expandable storage and wireless charging but it's actually grown on me over the past few months I've had it and I rather like it now it's fast with stock Android takes amazing pictures really and was one of the first phones with android seven then again google has made all these other apps that could have been amazing but they just kind of left them unfinished for some reason look at.
Google allo it's their new messaging app that they released a few months back and again it has some awesome features that you can't do with regular SMS it could basically be like the iMessage for
Android but you know one thing it can't do text messages that's right you can't use this text messaging app as the default text messaging app in order to actually use it both people must have the app installed and most people do not now if you could use it as a default text messaging app this wouldn't really be a big deal like iMessage on the iPhone you think it would just send rich text to those who have allo and regular SMS to those who don't you would think instead if you try to send a message with allo to someone who doesn't have the app it sends this bizarre group of multiple text messages to the person telling them to download the app and then just chucks your message at the end of it it doesn't even send those texts from your number it's some random number owned by Google so the people like who is this person texting me the whole system makes no sense at all why not just do it like iMessage where it doesn't let you use the advanced features in a message unless the other person has the app at least
Android but you know one thing it can't do text messages that's right you can't use this text messaging app as the default text messaging app in order to actually use it both people must have the app installed and most people do not now if you could use it as a default text messaging app this wouldn't really be a big deal like iMessage on the iPhone you think it would just send rich text to those who have allo and regular SMS to those who don't you would think instead if you try to send a message with allo to someone who doesn't have the app it sends this bizarre group of multiple text messages to the person telling them to download the app and then just chucks your message at the end of it it doesn't even send those texts from your number it's some random number owned by Google so the people like who is this person texting me the whole system makes no sense at all why not just do it like iMessage where it doesn't let you use the advanced features in a message unless the other person has the app at least
then it's still worth downloading as a text message app even if barely anyone else has it you can still use.
It as it stands now it's just this random other messaging app that is just a hassle to use separately because no one else has it now I don't pretend to have all the answers but I mean come on these are
such basic improvements that Google is obviously capable of it's almost like they're purposely holding back and in the case of allo I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case you think Google has been rebranding their default messenger app recently to Android messages which will be shipped default
the Android phones in the future and it will support a lot of the new RCF features that cell networks are moving towards perhaps they can't add SMS supports allo or else there would be too much feature overlap with the other apps and that would make the Android messages team sad Google isn't just this
single monolithic company it has a ton of different departments and it's pretty obvious that they have an issue with one hand not talking to the other I mean why else would they have so many completely
separate messaging apps instead of just combining them this might all sound like.
such basic improvements that Google is obviously capable of it's almost like they're purposely holding back and in the case of allo I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case you think Google has been rebranding their default messenger app recently to Android messages which will be shipped default
the Android phones in the future and it will support a lot of the new RCF features that cell networks are moving towards perhaps they can't add SMS supports allo or else there would be too much feature overlap with the other apps and that would make the Android messages team sad Google isn't just this
single monolithic company it has a ton of different departments and it's pretty obvious that they have an issue with one hand not talking to the other I mean why else would they have so many completely
separate messaging apps instead of just combining them this might all sound like.
I'm just beating on Google just for the sake of ranting but really I'm just frustrated because I want all of these apps and products to succeed and Google always manages to let these awesome products die for the stupidest reason and I think the main reason is that Google always seems to make their new products difficult for the average person to use they create these apps as if everyone in the world is a computer expert tech enthusiast in reality the average customer doesn't want to have to do anything they don't want to have to look up all the possible different messaging apps even if they know others exist a vast majority of customers are just going to use the default settings the default apps and that's it.
But Google's doesn't seem to get that I guess they create these awesome apps with great features but instead of adding the features to the current default app that everyone uses they just throw up a totally separate app on the App Store and expect everyone to download it meanwhile half the people don't even know it exists in the first place and the other half doesn't care and those that are left that actually are interested can't use it because no one else does Google have seriously got to get their act together I'm sick of seeing all the best products getting abandoned because no one knew about them take for example the google wallet card ever heard of this this thing was awesome you could add money to your
Google Wallet count and get this physical card that works like a debit or credit card you go to an ATM and take money off it but the best thing about it was that unlike literally every other debit card on the planet you could instantly transfer money to it from your bank account this means that instead having to carry around my actual debitcard which could get lost or stolen or skimmed or whatever if I needed money from my ATM card I could go on my phoneadd fifty bucks to my wallet then 10 seconds later get it out with a card and it's like an extra buffer between my bank account and anyone that might be
trying to steal the card if they steal the card they only get what's in that little wallet but with any other debit card from a bank transferring money you know takes about a business day.
Google Wallet count and get this physical card that works like a debit or credit card you go to an ATM and take money off it but the best thing about it was that unlike literally every other debit card on the planet you could instantly transfer money to it from your bank account this means that instead having to carry around my actual debitcard which could get lost or stolen or skimmed or whatever if I needed money from my ATM card I could go on my phoneadd fifty bucks to my wallet then 10 seconds later get it out with a card and it's like an extra buffer between my bank account and anyone that might be
trying to steal the card if they steal the card they only get what's in that little wallet but with any other debit card from a bank transferring money you know takes about a business day.
You can't do it instantly but you see with this the best thing was that google actually fronted the money for you and put the funds in your account instantly before the bank transaction was completed so you didn't have to wait at all no one else does this so this cannot be replaced there's nothing else like this and it was pretty freaking awesome right unfortunately you can't use it anymore because Google stops the wallet card program last year all because not enough people used it well Google maybe you should have actually told people that it existed the only reason I knew about it was I just happened to stumble
upon it while digging through google wallet settings one day and anyone else I told about it had never heard of it and you probably never did either Google does this time and time again make an awesome product don't tell anyone about it think huh no one's using it must not be good let's shut it down you just run a single ad for your product for God's sake google or add like a little notification in your other apps that tells people that these other things exist it's ridiculous but what sucks the most is that they don't even seem to have learned anything and this will probably continue for a while so I guess that's enough for me I do want to hear what you guys have to say I mean let me know what you think Google is thinking..
upon it while digging through google wallet settings one day and anyone else I told about it had never heard of it and you probably never did either Google does this time and time again make an awesome product don't tell anyone about it think huh no one's using it must not be good let's shut it down you just run a single ad for your product for God's sake google or add like a little notification in your other apps that tells people that these other things exist it's ridiculous but what sucks the most is that they don't even seem to have learned anything and this will probably continue for a while so I guess that's enough for me I do want to hear what you guys have to say I mean let me know what you think Google is thinking..
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