They've regressed for a long time and there's no signal to consumers that "AI" is anything that "fixes" or brings back what was working.
The example I always give is when google maps got speech recognition, I could ask it "Hey google, what's the E.T.A." and it would magically respond with how long till I arrive. Somewhere along the line it broke and for years now it doesn't work... the last time I tried my phone actually brought up the web browser and did a web search. smh.
The first thing I did when they forced gemini was I went to look how to disable it. Why? It override the old voice I chose to read calender events in the morning... in fact it would start reading like normal, then that stupid gemini voice would cut in and be entirely unhelpful.
its all enshitification.
Oh my gosh, thank you for writing this so that I know I'm not going insane. I keep thinking there's no way things have gotten worse, like maybe I'm miss remembering? But I was pretty sure I wasn't miss remembering
> "Hey google, what's the E.T.A."
I just tried this, verbatim, and it works perfectly.
> I ... disable(d) it
I see. So you intentionally broke the feature, now you complain about it being broken.
Just tried it. Still broken. Maps doesn't respond at all now. I get the beep that maps hears my "hey google", but that's it now.
> I see. So you intentionally broke the feature, now you complain about it being broken.
nope. that was a recent thing when they forced gemini on the phone. woke up one day hearing a different voice and then went searching how to disable that. maps has always been borked.
The fact that you think this has anything to do with Maps is weird.