Google Assistant|Gemini does not understand my requests anymore

Configuration
1

Request spoken to my Android phone:

éteins lumières parents
(= switch off lights parents)

Up to “recently”, Google (Assistant?) after a few seconds of thinking was doing the action and informing me that all the two lights have been switched off.

After the change from Assistant to Gemini (? - I stopped following the name changes in this ecosystem) it now does nonsense: sometimes it looks for lights to buy, sometimes it translates the sentence, sometimes it repeats it in English with a French accent. What it does not do is to switch off the lights :neutral_face:. This is the same with all the simple instructions I used so far (switching on/off lights and opening/closing roller covers).

This is not only annoying to me, but also to my wife, which puts me in jeopardy.

I am here to ask you:

  • does your Google something still works after the change?
  • if yes, do you use another language than English?
  • if yes, did you change something
  • if no, what have you tried to fix this nightmare?

For the context:

  • I host HA in a docker container, available as https://hass.example.com
  • I also have a Nabu Casa account, this is how I connected HA to GA (I had a manual connection first, but NC is easier and this is IMO a nice way to support them)
  • outside of these voice requests everything else works as planned
  • Google Home sees my lights and can interact with them
2

Apparently Gemini is being forced on Google Home devices on some lottery basis. My voice automations stopped working this week. I was able to disable Gemini on my phone and text/voice commands still work there. However, my Google speakers silently fail. The voice command is displayed on the screen, but nothing happens. Only the commands issued from my phone show up in the activity log.

I can only assume that Google was so broken before that people no longer have any expectations? I’ve found several posts like yours with zero comments.

3

I went the same way as you and disabled Gemini on my phone and it worked again. Then I made a mistake and re-enabled it, and now I cannot find how to disable it :slight_smile: (Google does not make it easy)

As for my mini home speakers, I have 3 cases:

  • they understand the request, it happens for some entireties but usually fails
  • they say that a given entity is not configured (it is, in Google Home)
  • and the third one, the funny one, is when I b ask something in French (which is the language I interavt with, always) and the device answers me, in a parody of English (you know, the stereotype of a French that speaks English with a complete French accent :joy:

Google is weird