I’m convinced nobody on the Google/Nest Home teams has ever used the product outside of testing in a VM.

Product managers are no longer about the users. They just want to have some "impact" and then they move onto another product.

Same when you know how the sausage is made.

> Should this go on some running ToDo list app I use? Should it ask me for a due date? Should it go on my calendar? And that's a very simple example.

Yes. If it isn't obvious from the context, it should ask.

What it should not do, is demand you to issue all your commands in format of "${brand 1}, do ${something} with ${brand 2} in ${brand 3}". That's what makes current voice assistants a cringe.

> somehow none of the voice assistants managed to improve.

No one has been working on the old generation of assistants for years now. They all basically came to the conclusion that the architecture that everyone had settled on was a dead end and wouldn't get any better, so they directed their attention elsewhere.

Now Google is working on it again, but just using an LLM for better intent parsing isn't exciting enough to warrant attention, so in classic Google fashion they launched a brand new product (Gemini) that's going to run alongside Assistant for a few years confusing everyone until they yank Assistant (which still will have features that haven't been ported).

Apple seems to be working on improving Siri rather than starting fresh, but it's taken them a while to get it ready because Apple never moves on something fast.

Actually, speech-to-text benefits massively from a good language model. It's impossible to do speech to text if you don't understand the language. The better you understand the language and the context of what is being said, the better you will be at speech-to-text. So it's no surprise whatsoever to anyone that the best-in-class language model would have the best in class speech-to-text.

I think a lot of people underestimate how disconnected simple sound patterns are from human speech. It's hard if not impossible to even recognize word boundaries on a phonogram of regular human speech, even for highly eloquent speakers in formal settings. And many sounds are entirely ambiguous, people rarely understand the exact phonemes they use in practice. For example, most native English speakers pronounce the "peech" part of "speech" more like "beach" than like "peach", if you look at a phonogram [0]. Phonetics is really complicated, and varies far more between languages than people tend to assume.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U37hX8NPgjQ