I have a crystal clear memory of the day I stopped trying to make voice assistants work for me.

I use a timer every day to brew my coffee. With a voice assistant I can set a timer, but with the lack of a screen I can't see how much time is left. One day I thought, "I'm going to finally get around to digging into this voice interface and see what the options are," hoping for something like, "Hey Dingus, set a five minute timer and notify me when there's 10 seconds left."

Or better yet, "Hey Dingus, five minute timer, with notify at 10 seconds."

Notice that this almost maps 1:1 onto a shell command with option flags, just verbally interfaced: "$ timer 5m --with-notify 10s"

Notice also a complete willingness on my part to learn how the thing works and change how I'm using it accordingly. This is the opposite of end user laziness. I'm willing to invest effort in becoming a "Power User" of my voice assistant.

So I looked for documentation, ready to read and use my brain to understand it and do what it tells me in order to start and stop my timers with greater proficiency.

...I found none.

Literally, there isn't any. They don't have documentation. Nowhere is there, even for someone motivated and willing to learn, the ability to do so.

Ok, well that is understandable if these things are changing rapidly. Maybe there's the equivalent to a "$ timer --help" baked into the assistant itself. Maybe it can tell me what options exist so I can use them. I ask the assistant to explain itself. "What are my options when setting a timer?"

It can't parse my question. Literally, it doesn't know what I'm asking for. Because nobody ever considered that a user might ask that question or even want to know that information.

At that point, on the spot, I gave up. Clearly this thing is not designed or intended to be a thing that one could gain skill with. It's an utterly unserious product.

I would very happily learn an entire verbal DSL, a whole pidgin dialect of English, purely for interacting with my voice assistant. "Hey Dingus, five minute staged timer: thirty seconds, two minutes, one minute, one minute, remainder, with countdown from five seconds" is not "natural language" anymore. But you can bet you'd hear me saying it, if that's all it took to make the voice assistant run my coffee brewing recipe with nothing but my voice. And then, hey bonus, let me bind that to a personal shortcut so all I need to say is "Hey Dingus, coffee timer" and I don't even need to reach for my phone.

But you can't do that. It literally does not support being taken seriously. Or, if it can, the design is utterly hostile to me discovering how. So I've never even tried to do anything, since that very day, other than turning smart lights on and off.

My point is: I didn't fail the technology. I came to the table with willingness to tinker and experiment, willingness to change my expectations to suit the design as I discovered it, willingness to work to make it a part of my routine. The technology failed me.

I Fired Google