something that's really driving me nuts about our Current Moment of "AI" powered everything is that the few things i do want to be able to do by talking to a computer that pretends to respond intelligently don't even work as well as they did within recent memory. over the last year, text-to-speech-- which i rely on a lot-- has gotten significantly worse. and half the time now when i open my google assistant app and tell it to set a timer, it doesn't actually do it.

i do not want my computer to try to write novels or make art for me. i do not even want it to do most of my tedious tasks, because tedious often means complex enough that you don't want to trust a computer with it. i DO want to be able to say "hey computer, on july 17th i have a doctor's appointment at 3 PM, please put that on the calendar" and have it actually happen. previously this was happening. i was doing that. i was talking to my magical data slab and it was putting shit on my grocery list and it RULED. i have ADHD. i have tendonitis. being able to yell something at my phone as soon as i think of it and be reminded later is a godsend. i love NOT pushing through a pain flare to text someone something important. but these features are degrading right in front of me and meanwhile, all the fucking tech bros are off dancing around the altar of AI while the actually useful and good things they've made just falls the fuck apart!!

it's not even intelligence and THE THINGS I ALREADY HAD WERE FINE, UNTIL RECENTLY. :|

The weird thing about the AI Hype Cycle is it's an actual cycle, I feel like every five years for the last 15 we've had the exact same technology rebranded and sold to us as a new thing. "Algorithms" became "Machine Learning" became "AI" and nothing substantive changed with each rename, each of these things is the same statistical analysis being done in mostly the same way by mostly even the same companies. It's just over time the investor dog-and-pony show changed from a search engine to pictures of hallucinated dogs to a markov chain bot.

But things actually have gotten worse somehow. I remember at the start of the 10s Google seemed to be doing a lot of stuff with natural language processing. I could run a natural language query into Google Search and it would seem like it was trying to parse it. I could click a button in Google Calendar and type "July 23 1 PM meeting with Jennie" and it would do that. The more "machine learning"y Google got the more the NLP stuff seemed to bitrot, like Google thought it wasn't important anymore? At some point you could suddenly no longer do natural language inputs to Google Calendar and I assumed that this was because they'd moved natural language exclusively to Assistant, which I refuse to turn on because I don't ever want to talk to a computer, I don't even like talking to people , if I could type to people instead of talking to do them I would do that, and now my Google Calendar is full of things like a meeting at 3PM named "1PM meeting with Jennie" and sometimes I miss appointments because of that.

But if the people who actually do use and want to use Assistant are seeing even that get worse as Google starts insisting to investors (speaking over the horrified screams of the engineers) that their business is chatbots now… I don't even know.

I was trying to find some statistic tied to a year the other day, and it feels like "statistic location year" as a search would have found it even like 6 months ago.

... Literally nothing. Nothing tied to that year. Nothing tied to that statistic. Just the location. That's all.

Hell, even stuff like trying to use Google Assistant for controlling the lights is getting worse and I don't know why. Nothing's changed about the setup, but suddenly, everything's awful.