I just disabled Google assistant and all of its functions, it's beyond useless and probably the most frustrating thing I have ever used on my phone. And I don't mean just the voice controls, but all the "helpful" tips and suggestions are just bad and I can't stand them.
When driving I don't bother to use Siri for anything other than "call <person>" or "text <person>".
The most hilarious example of how bad Siri is for me, is that literally 100% of the time that I'm playing something on Apple TV, if I say "Hey Siri, pause the TV" (or any variation, calling it Apple TV, including the name of the room, etc.) it always replies that there's nothing currently playing. And if I tell Siri on my phone to play on the Apple TV, all it can do is start Apple Music playing a random song on the TV. It can however respond OK to "resume on Apple TV" which restarts whatever I was watching that had been paused.
OK Google is awful for me, it repeats back exactly what I said but rarely interprets it, at all. "Don't know how to help with 'navigate home'", "'send a message'", "'find a supermarket'". Bleurgh. This is via Android Auto. Next minute it's reading me a text and asking if I want to reply by "SMS or WhatsApp".
None of these systems show you enough 'under the hood' to know why it's failing and so react. Clearly, here the voice recognition, tts are working well; some optional visual feedback would be great - like show on screen a list of responses:
- Keyword heard
- OK Google responding
- Voice1 recognised
- Input "navigate home"
- Input sent to maps
- Maps didn't understand
- Reporting failure
I guess Google know all this, at the time of the query, but as they don't know what I'm trying to do (though 'navigate home' is pretty clear, perhaps I was actually saying 'buy a gnome') ... doesn't seem like there's a proper feedback loop to help direct/correct the system?
"OK Google, navigate home" has never failed to work for me for a couple of years now. Maybe you had opened the app to a profile that doesn't have your home address configured? Maybe you had been logged out?
The sole thing I use it for is setting alarms/timers, or starting the process of a calendar appointment. Those are the two use-cases I've found useful.
Say "navigate to X" also can kinda work with less fumbling than typing half the time but it's a bit messy.
