Enlarge / The most impressive part is what Home Assistant's voice control does not do: share your voice input with a large entity aiming to sell you things. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Last year, the leaders of Home Assistant declared 2023 the “ Year of the Voice. ” The goal was to let users of the DIY home automation platform “control Home Assistant in their own language.” It was a bold shot to call, given people’s expectations from using Alexa and the like. Further, the Home Assistant team wasn’t even sure where to start.

Did they succeed, looking in from early 2024? In a very strict sense, yes. Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask “Nabu” or “Jarvis” or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations. And you can ask about the weather. Narrowly defined mission: Accomplished.

In a broader, more accurate sense, Home Assistant voice control has a ways to go. Your verb set is limited to toggling, setting, and other smart home interactions. The easiest devices to use for this don’t have the best noise cancellation or pick-up range. Errors aren’t handled gracefully, and you get the best results by fine-tuning the names you call everything you control.

Enlarge / Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google's cost-cutters are still working overtime, with more layoffs this week and cuts to Google Assistant functionality.

First up, The New York Times reports Google laid off "hundreds" of workers in "several divisions" on Wednesday. Core engineering, the Google Assistant, and the hardware division all lost people. The report says that "Google said that most of the hardware cuts affected a team working on augmented reality." AR cuts are eyebrow-raising since that's quickly going to be one of the highest-profile teams at the company this year, as Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm team up to battle the Apple Vision Pro. FitBit was apparently also a big loser, with 9to5Google reporting that Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman and "other Fitbit leaders" have left Google.

Over the years, Google has rarely laid off workers, but since January of last year, a new focus on cost-cutting has made layoffs a regular occurrence at Google. The purge started with an announcement of 12,000 layoffs in January, which took until at least March to complete. Then there were more layoffs at Alphabet companies Waymo and Everyday Robots in March, Waze layoffs in June, recruiting layoffs in September, Google News cuts in October, and now these layoffs in January. There are rumors of more layoffs happening this month, too, focusing on the ad sales division.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Hey Android users, are you tired of Google's neglect of Google Assistant? Well, one of Google's biggest rivals, OpenAI's ChatGPT, is apparently coming for the premium phone space occupied by Google's voice assistant. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority found that the ChatGPT app is working on support for Android's voice assistant APIs and a system-wide overlay UI. If the company rolls out this feature, users could set the ChatGPT app as the system-wide assistant app, allowing it to pop up anywhere in Android and respond to user questions. ChatGPT started as a text-only generative AI but received voice and image input capabilities in September.

Usually, it's the Google Assistant with system-wide availability in Android, but that's not special home cooking from Google—it all happens via public APIs that technically any app can plug into. You can only have one app enabled as the system-wide "Default Assistant App," and beyond the initial setting, the user always has to change it manually. The assistant APIs are designed to be powerful, keeping some parts of the app running 24/7 no matter where you are. Being the default Assistant app enables launching the app via the power button or a gesture, and the assist app can read the current screen text and images for processing.

The Default Assistant App settings. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

If some Android manufacturer signed a deal with ChatGPT and included it as a bundled system application, ChatGPT could even use an always-on voice hotword, where saying something like "Hey, ChatGPT" would launch the app even when the screen is off. System apps get more permissions than normal apps, though, and an always-on hotword is locked behind these system app permissions, so ChatGPT would need to sign a distribution deal with some Android manufacturer. Given the red-hot popularity of ChatGPT, though, I'm sure a few would sign up if it were offered.

Enlarge (credit: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance )

Move over Google Assistant, Google is apparently working on a new AI. The Information reports that Google is working on a new "Pixie" AI assistant that will be exclusive to Pixel devices. Pixie will reportedly be powered by Google's new " Gemini " AI model. The report says Pixie would launch first on the Pixel 9: "Eventually, Google wants to bring the features to its lower-end phones and devices like its watch."

So far, Google and Amazon reportedly have plans to reboot their voice assistants with the new wave of large language models. Both are only at the rumor stage, so neither company has promoted how a large language model will help a voice assistant . Today, the typical complaints are usually around voice recognition accuracy and response time, which a language model doesn't seem like it would help with. Presumably, large language models would help allow longer-form, more in-depth responses to questions, but whether consumers want to hear a synthetic robot voice read out a paragraph-long response is something the market will figure out.

Another feature listed in the report is that Google might build "glasses that could make use of the AI’s ability to recognize the objects a wearer is seeing." Between Google Glass and Project Iris , Google has started and stopped a lot of eyewear projects.

Enlarge / The grocery items and random thoughts you shout at your phone or your speaker are now kept in Google Keep, not in Assistant. Assistant, which in 2018 earned its own monorail wrap at CES in Las Vegas. (credit: Getty Images)

Google Assistant, the app that was once Google's guiding star and is now slowly losing features, is handing over control of notes and lists to Google Keep . This is somewhat good news, as Keep is a decent note-keeping app. But it's also concerning because there's now one major place to keep your data that Google might one day abandon.

As spotted by 9to5Google , Google is moving the Shopping List and other notes you may have dictated to its voice-centered Assistant into Google Keep. Google Keep is originally where the Assistant kept your shopping list, but in 2017, Google moved it into Google Express. Express was Google's shopping-centered site that used to offer an Amazon-Prime-like membership, but it has morphed somewhat into the Google Shopping storefront. As Ars' Ron Amadeo emphatically noted at the time , moving the shopping list created a new, weird, ad-link-littered, non-intuitive place to store the fact that you need to buy more cat food.

Google brought support for storing shopping and other lists in other apps in 2019. This included Keep, but also third-party apps like Any.do, AnyList, and Bring. Third-party support ended in June , so now there's just Keep.