Google Assistant claims to be always learning. But the reality is that it is doing the opposite of improving: it is anti-improving. Things that once worked nicely and simply either suddenly no longer work or yield different responses than they did or else require you to provide much more extensive information in order to answer what once was a simple question. In addition, there is no aiblity to customize it, no awareness that it has that you have asked the same question 50 times and that you really do not want to have to go through the same extra steps any more and just want to go to the answer.

So the reality is that Google Assistant is becoming dumber, stupider, worse ... choose your own negative term for deradation of quality.

I owned a Google Home cylinder and then multiple minis for more than a year before buying an Alexa Echo Dot. The comparison of the two is striking. In some cases, Google is better than Alexa, and in other cases Alexa is best. But one thing that Alexa does not do is to become worse over the course of time. Google does become worse.

And it is not just on the Google Home devices: the Google Assistant on my android phone has also become worse.

Here are some examples of how Google Assistant has become worse not better. There are more, but I do not want to make this a long web page.

But there is new bad news. For years, when asked "What time is it?", Google told what it is. Suddenly in 2022, Google started responding instead with "Sorry, I don't understand." Clearly, there is a huge quality control failure in rolling out a new version with this problem. And clearly there is an even larger quality control problem in failing to promptly fix this newly-created failure. Sadly, both are par for the course with Google: quality control really does not seem to matter much to Google.

It used to be that if you asked Google Home for the current air quality index, it would tell you the answer, just as it would if you asked the current temperature or wind speed. It is a simple fact, needing only a simple answer.

But then suddenly GH's response to the request for the air quality index was "For that, you might want to try ..." and it listed 3 or 4 different options. You would then have to tell it one of those options, and it would then spew out instructions for using that option, and you would then have to give it another question, after which you would receive the air quality index. What had been a short and simple answer to a simple question became a very complex and lengthy process just to reach the same answer.

Then GH changed again. When asked for the current air quality index, it responded "Sure. For that you might like Air Check. Want to give it a try?" Saying "no" does not get you the air quality index, it only bails out of the request. So you have to say "yes". Then GH says "Sure here's Air Check." and you then hear the Air Check instructions. In addition, there is no sense of "here" so that you have to specify your location. And no matter how many times you ask for the air quality index, GH always does the same thing. There is no sense that you want to skip the wasteful time and effort of specifying Air Check over and over and over and over again.

What was once a simple short answer to the same kind of question as the temperature is now a far worse process that is very frustrating to experience. Alexa, on the other hand, gives you the short simple answer that you want.

It used to be that you could tell the Google Assistant on your android phone to add an item to your calendar. It would ask you for the title. You told it the title, and it then told you the entry was added to your calendar. The voice recognition was far inferior to GH voice recognition so that your calendar entry title often came out garbled, but at least it added it to your calendar so that you achieved that much.

But then in April 2019, the GA began behaving differently. When it asked you for the title of the event and you told it the title, instead of adding the event to your calendar, it did an Internet search and gave you back the results. You had no way to add the event to your calendar via your phone any more. This was sporadic: sometimes it behaved normally, but more than half the time it did the Internet search instead of adding the title to your calendar.