Google Nest Mini

About 2 years ago I spent a weekend completely re-doing my wifi environment because the reliability of the Google Minis plummeted. Long response times, multiple rooms answering/clobbering each other so nothing answers, etc. I should have just checked /r/googlehome because the sentiment of "it used to be great, it's total shit now" is posted every week or two. And it continues to get worse. Losing the multi-room streaming over the Sonos patent was bad enough, but the least they could have done is actually remove the functionality outright instead of just silently neutering it - to this day it'll happily say it's playing on "upstairs" or "all speakers" but nothing plays. > underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services Absolutely. I got all of my minis for either 30CAD or for free through promotions. These devices were always sold at a loss on the hope they'll make it up on the other end. ChatGPT's voice chat feature in the iOS app is incredible. It's easily 2-3 orders of magnitude better than Google Home when it was operating at it's peak. I'd happily pay a (potentially steep) monthly fee for voice assistants that aren't neutered and have similar capabilities. They really are fantastic when they work.

Chromecast Audios are still easy to pick up on eBay (or if you're in the UK, CeX, that's where I got one). Any old cheap plug tied to Home Assistant (or plain old Google Home in my case) for auto powering on my Cambridge Audio amp. (I'm not fancy enough to care about automated input switching between TV and music, I just get up and turn the knob, but turning off the hifi remotely I like) Music Assistant supports streaming to Chromecast from TIDAL at the native (24 bit, 96khz, flac/m4a?) format. And TIDAL mobile app itself supports casting to Chromecast devices as you'd expect. Those 3 things combined got me an old school hifi set up which I can include in my Chromecast groups of shitty sounding second-hand nest minis, so I get multi room audio where one room has the most audio :-) but I could swap out the shitty pucks for some more CC audios if I wanted to fork out for more amps and bookshelf speakers. I trust Google to at least not intentionally brick their old devices and chromecast is built on mDNS and documented http endpoints enough that you can automate your own stuff in your LAN that you should be able to keep that stuff working in home assistant + music assistant should Google ever decide randomly they wanna sunset Google home (so, 50% chance of them announcing that in 2025). Homebrew you can roll your own DIY multi room hifi audio using stuff like Hifiberry, too. Pipewire/PulseAudio/JACK on raspberry pi / NUCs should be able to get you surround sound over the netw…

I have gotten to the point where I assume everything with a CPU and a wireless connection is going to self-destruct at some point soon. When we were getting a new oven we paid extra for the lowest tech one we could find! Please no touch screens! Example: My wife gave me a google mini that I use as a talking alarm clock. That's all: what time is it, please set an alarm. Period. Recently it told me it no longer works because I didn't install "Google Home" on my phone. Nothing changed on the device or its circumstances. Someone at Google decided to make a change that broke it.

That might have been the initial hope of the team, before Google killed it. It's been on the graveyard for years with zero updates, my google assistance nest mini is arguably worse than when I bought it. I believe it is possible to have made it better, but they didn't try, they just gave up, like much of google products.

Google assistant is awful via the nest mini, I'd hard disagree that the accuracy has gotten better. I ask it for the time and it quotes some article on wikipedia about what time is or various movies with time in the name. I ask it to turn of the lights and it tells me 'power control is not supported yet' at least half the time. It's gotten worse since I bought it, it never did this and that is with even the most basic of tasks.

Just when you thought Google's branding couldn't get worse, they name a speaker after a thermostat.