Assistant has been wonky for years.

Recently my hub wouldn't recognise "goodnight" as a household routine command, only as a personal one. Instead it'd just respond with a chipper "goodnight!"

There's a new issue every week.

I feel that the last year has been awful for the assistant. We have a google nest mini or w/e in the bedroom, and I can't snooze my alarm for 10min without it shitting the bed and setting off the alarm, while also asking me if I meant 10am or pm (as if I'm setting a new alarm). To be clear, I can snooze for 9 or 11 minutes just fine. But 10 minutes is no good.

It blows my mind that half a year after the public launch of ChatGPT that Google Assistant seems to be getting dumber instead of smarter and Bard is a completely different silo'd product still.

My Google Assistant a while ago picked up a problem. I use it to set timers all the time. Suddenly, one day it wouldn't understand "set a timer for 3:30" anymore and I'd have to say "3:30 pm". Then its dementia progressed and it was setting timers for the next day unless I specified "today at 3:30 pm". Then the day after that lucidity returned and it regained the ability to do the basic "set a timer for 3:30". It doesn't feel like it actually understands language at all. I appreciate that they're making updates, but I wish they were updates for the better.

The first company that will sell me a smart speaker that works like ChatGPT/Bing/Bard/etc. and I throw my Nest speakers in the garbage and switch brands.

But the point that the reviewer makes (and that many others have made as well) is that it doesn't have to be like that. When undocked, the decision could have been made to allow the base to be a self-functioning smart speaker, like a Google Nest Mini. This is the functionality that most reviewers have wanted - so that it you undock the tablet, you could still use the speaker for voice commands or playing music.

So her biggest issue is that the tablet wasn’t on the dock when it needed to be used. Because she took it and wanted to use it for herself. Having a smart home hub means you can’t take it away and use it to surf the web.

Is this to downplay the pain points she encountered? Because reading it another way it seems like a total indictment of the concept behind merging a tablet with a smart hub.

Then why make it a tablet?

But also it doesn't support more than one user (it requires screen interaction to change the user before speaking the command, at that point could just directly type on a phone in the pocket)

Having a smart home hub means you can't take it away and use it to surf the web.

Easy fix: get two tablets. Better yet, get the number-of-people-in-the-household plus 1 tablets, so everyone has their own plus one to be the hub.