It’s okay to tell Google Assistant to self-destruct every once in a while

I’ve had my ups and downs with Google Assistant in the past, and have even written about how many of you have shared those frustrations. Unfortunately, a handful of users resort to cursing at their smart home speakers and displays in hopes of relieving the pressure of it being wrong in its responses so often.

This clearly has to do with the settings you tinker with in the Google app, your proximity to the device, and the clarity (or lack thereof) of your speech, among other variables. Still, Google has expressed its distaste with these human outbursts in recent memory by causing Assistant to say something to the effect of “Please don’t talk to me like that, I may just be an Assistant, but your words still matter”. It’s a phrase that I’ve only seen someone trigger once, but it immediately made them feel terrible about their irrational behavior. I mean, it is just a piece of technology, after all.

Well, fear not – I’ve got just the solution for anyone who wants to vent a bit while maintaining good relations with the Skynet AI that will one day be our overlords. Last night, my son and I were pretending to be robots and I was acting like I was shutting down and booting back up again (don’t judge me, we have lots of fun!) My boy asked me to stay up late, so I did what any mature adult would do on a school night – I pretended to be a robot who was self-destructing, naturally.

We normally try different phrases with Google Assistant to see how it will react – you know, for kicks – and so, we asked Google Assistant to self-destruct, and lo and behold, we discovered a fun, little Easter egg. Upon saying “hey Google, self-destruct”, it will reply “Okay, self-destructing”. Then, it will go on to make an electrocution noise, followed by the sound of chickens. I know, crazy strange, right?

I’m not sure how Google decided that this would be the combination it would use for self-destruction, but yeah, it made my son giggle, so it was worth it. Here’s a bonus tip – if you have a smart light in the same room, it will surprise you by turning red and then dimming orange before coming back to its full, bright default in sync with the noises. At first, it scared him, but then he couldn’t stop triggering the command.

There’s no doubt many of you are already familiar with this, and I certainly knew about other fun commands too, but it was our first time discovering this particular combination. The light trick didn’t work in other rooms when I activated the command there, so I’m not sure what’s going on with that, and all of my smart bulbs are Lenovo-branded. I’d love to hear your favorite Assistant commands in the comments, and if you end up using this one for fun or to blow off steam, let me know!