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On a related note: Audio virtual assistants, think Alexa, but more so Google Assistant, which are essentially glorified chatbots, are getting dumber in my arguably subjective experience: Phrases that used to work do not work anymore, only to be replaced with more obscure phrases. Simple information that worked earlier (When is sunrise? 7:13am!) now is being moved to third-party websites, which then don't deliver that information at all. Google Assistant only has the full feature set if my cell phone's system language is set to American English. Three out of four times GA answers with a variation of "I don't know, but I constantly learn".

GA was sold to me as "essentially an early version of Star-Trek-TNG-style computers, and we're improving on it's feature set constantly by using ML". What it is is an unreliable alarm clock (won't wake you if the Wifi's gone), a glorified voice-activated light switch and a constant source of frustration.




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