“I don’t know, but I found these results”: Google Assistant appears to be quiet quitting this year

I’ve been on the offensive against Google Assistant this year, and I’m not ashamed of it either. The virtual assistant has gone from world class to dumber than a box of rocks. It consistently fails to respond, toggle lights, performs completely unrelated actions, and more. It’s just so bad that I can hardly express my distaste for what it’s become.

This is no doubt largely in part due to the fact that Google has shifted most of the Assistant team over to its new Golden boy, Bard. The artificial intelligence is all the tech giant can talk about, and even during the I/O conference this year, Assistant was scarcely mentioned while Bard and other AI initiatives at the company took center stage.

Lately, something quite a bit worse than really all of those inconveniences has been occurring. I have my Nest Hub next to my desk and often ask it questions. In addition to showing me a picture of Kohl’s instead of telling me what time it is open until per my request, which in and of itself is ridiculous, it’s resorted to replying with “I don’t know, but I found these results”, before showing me a standard Google search page.

I’ve had this happen for a few months now at least, and Bryant Chappel of The Nerf Report reminded me how annoying it is and how much I wanted to complain about it, so thanks, Bryant! Now, if I wanted to Google search something with my eyes I’d likely just go to my Chromebook, phone or desktop and pop open a Google.com web page.

I would be so rich if I had a dollar for every time Google Assistant said "I don't know but here are some results" https://t.co/moyMphPAFa

— Bryant Chappel (@BryantChappel) June 4, 2023

Instead, I ask Assistant by voice on the Hub so that I can use my ears to hear useful information while my eyes are occupied. I mean, that’s why you bought a smart display too, right? Sure, it can ‘display’ things, but that information should be ‘at a glance’ if it can’t audibly tell you the simplified answer you’re seeking. Instead, Assistant bringing up a desktop version of Google Search with like, 6pt font is absurd.

This points to a much larger issue though. This year, with the announcement and focus on Bard, Google Assistant has seemed to ‘quiet quit’ (a term I really do hate). It’s acting like a minimum wage employee that knows it’s being smoked out of a job, so it puts in the minimum effort in hopes of collecting a paycheck and not being found out.

Trust me, Google, everyone has noticed. In fact, I’m not the first person to point out how bad Assistant has gotten. What’s odd is that from my very limited understanding, you don’t need to maintain anything you’ve already set up on the knowledge graph, per se, right? Why isn’t Assistant just as good as it was before its resources were pulled? Shouldn’t it just not get any better? why is it getting so much worse?

All of these questions need to be answered, and Google has been extremely quiet on the matter. What I think is going to happen, and I keep reiterating this since I believe it so strongly, is that the company will replace the guts of Assistant with Bard AI and still call it ‘Assistant’ since that’s a household name (for better or worse now!).

If this happens, we could be looking at a new era of virtual assistants that don’t suck, because let’s face it, Google’s version was supposed to be the future, but now it just looks like it’s struggling to keep up or perform even the most basic of tasks.

I’d go so far as to say it’s so terrible at its job that I often just prefer to do the task myself, manual labor included. It’s not that it’s difficult, but Assistant was created to take away those mundane and repetitive tasks to help users focus on things that matter more. Now that it’s tanked, I’m quickly remembering how much I hate doing those smaller things. A real shame, for sure, but we’ll see what the future holds. While we wait, we can at least use our Nest Hub as a glorified voice-enabled desktop!