Nest Mini

[...] and since tools are all company-mandated, the best I can do is continuously ignore or say “not now”, but one day Teams will rollover on a forced software update and I’ll have no choice but to “let” CoPilot schedule meetings in an app that already consistently warns that I’m in a different time zone despite all of us being east coast (I’ve checked so many settings, and even with another single coworker who has checked his we see the warning). [...] Eventually my Google Nest Minis will stop asking me to try Gemini and force me to, and they’ll all get binned unless I can find a firmware replacement which I doubt is out there, and then I’ll get deep into HomeKit and local voice recognition for turning the lights on and off and setting timers because that’s literally 99% of my use-case, and I’m sure Gemini would fuck it up.

It’s wild how many of you have issues with Siri - and to be clear I’m not here to discount those issues, and I very much believe all of the anecdotes here. For me, Siri on either phone or watch is pretty much perfect - I don’t ask for much, mostly timers or making reminders. Google’s Nest Minis though? [...] If I don’t annunciate “play rain sounds” clearly enough I get an album called “Rain Songs” that is very much NOT calming for bed time. It doesn’t help that none of these understand that if I whisper a command, it should respond quietly - honestly the siris and nests and alexas all got like one iteration and then stopped it feels like. [...] Eg if every night around 1am I say “play rain sounds” my god just learn that I’m not, in all likelihood, asking to hear an album I’ve never listened to!

[...] It’s why I haven’t and won’t enable Gemini, and I’ll likely chuck my nest minis once I’m forced to have an LLM-based experience. Hopefully they’ll be able to at least function as dumb Bluetooth speakers still but I’m not holding out hope on that end

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. [...] 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. [...] 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 network with minimal latency (although you probably want decent ethernet), since you can make a virtual sink that bridges the audio servers together. [...] There's definitely ways to get multi room audio of equivalent or better quality and at-least-equal user experience as long as you're willing to in

"Hey Google, give me showtimes for Aquaman" opens the assistant on my phone, and transcribes my request correctly. There's a Nest mini (2nd gen) two meters away, but the device that answers is the Google Home 2016 in a different room. [...] I remember my exact words when I bought this thing: I have seen the future, and it sucks.

Google assistant is awful via the nest mini, I'd hard disagree that the accuracy has gotten better. [...] It's gotten worse since I bought it, it never did this and that is with even the most basic of tasks.

I have both Nest Mini's and Alexas strewn throughout my house hooked up to my home automation etc.. [...] Makes me wonder if they are slowly stepping away from Google assistant.

[...] I've been pretty happy with my Google hardware so far (Nexus and then Pixel phones, Nest minis, pixel buds), but now that I'm interested in a smart watch, I'm running into a bit of a wall. I want to want a Pixel watch, but it sounds like the integration with the Pixel phone is not all that great, and for a lot of fitness tracking you also need a separate FitBit account, and have to use a separate FitBit app (!) and it doesn't integrate super well with all my existing data in Google's own Google Fit app that I've got. [...] Maybe just a simple, standalone, cheap laptop is ideal for them, and that's who this is targeting.

I got a free Nest Mini a few years ago and decided to set it up recently It's no longer compatible with current-day phones so I had to find an old APK in order to even hook it up to the Wifi network

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.

my brain is constantly asking questions around midnight. & I'm either Googling the answers on my phone or asking Google Nest Mini 🗣🔈

[...] I got a free Nest Mini and Chromecast that way, too. [...]

So, yeah, getting a smartwatch. I don't need or even really want a smartwatch, as I am an analog watch guy, but at the bargain price of free (over the course of two years) I couldn't turn it down. It should work well with my Pixel and Pixel Buds and maybe Nest Mini, not so much with my iPad.

Testing out mini-speakers in my office. I've currently got a Google Nest Mini attached to my laptop (16" MacBook Pro M2 Max)...the speakers in the MacBook are better, and it's not particularly close. Anyone got any good-sounding mini-speakers to test?

I only got a Google Nest mini because they were giving them away for free, and only used it to stream the local classical music station all day. Then I bought a Barbie pink little boombox at Walmart for $10 to do the same thing when I moved somewhere with better reception.

Begging people to get the spying devices out of their houses or at least do surgery on them to remove their ears. (I'm a Google Nest Mini person but I use them exclusively as speakers I can chromecast to, so before I hook them up I crack them open and stab their microphones out)

[...] We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. [...]

I believe it's because it's at least a magnitude more expensive to run an LLM instead of a basic voice assistant ML model. Especially when considering anyone who has purchased a Google Nest Mini can use it, for free, forever.