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I do not have any faith in Alexa OR Google home, despite Amazon on paper being a juggernaut of market share and Google being a juggernaut of AI. How they are f

I do not have any faith in Alexa OR Google home, despite Amazon on paper being a juggernaut of market share and Google being a juggernaut of AI. How they are fundamentally architected is bad. Cloud-based services that run over a single WAN connection? That basically guarantees Google Home and Alexa are bound to be only ever used for frivolous things you don't really need because the smart assistants are fundamentally unreliable. Initially I didn't think this was THAT big of a deal, but the more experience I got with smart homes the more I'm thinking the ecosystem's are doomed to plateau while Homekit keeps trucking past them since its reliability problems are not as severe. Amazon and Google are building castles on sand.

kccqzy 3y ago
Before Google bought Nest, I even remember Nest made sure their products could all communicate with each other on the local network without the Internet. Nest devices set up a local network for themselves in the IPv6 ULA range. IPv6 addresses are so plentiful that a made-up ULA network won't cause any problems. I thought that was a pretty clever technique to ensure falling back to offline use. It did generate some questions on various online forums when people discuss Nest home devices were sending out IPv6 RAs. I guess but cannot confirm that Google has continued this practice. It didn't seem like the problems you mention exist, unless Google did something stupid and disabled all of this perfectly working functionality.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Besides what you mentioned there’s the local home SDK. Google is still using the actual Nest app and I’m pretty sure what you mentioned works through that app. There’s also matter now for local control. The thing is that there’s this mishmash because unlike Apple they weren’t local first across the board from the get go. In any case, I’m holding out for a HomePod mini refresh because if they throw a s9 chip in there it’s going to be able to do basic voice recognition offline Maybe matter can save Alexa/Google home and I’m too pessimistic but I don’t like how they work now.

kccqzy 3y ago

Before Google bought Nest, I even remember Nest made sure their products could all communicate with each other on the local network without the Internet. Nest devices set up a local network for themselves in the IPv6 ULA range. IPv6 addresses are so plentiful that a made-up ULA network won't cause any problems. I thought that was a pretty clever technique to ensure falling back to offline use. It did generate some questions on various online forums when people discuss Nest home devices were sending out IPv6 RAs. I guess but cannot confirm that Google has continued this practice. It didn't seem like the problems you mention exist, unless Google did something stupid and disabled all of this perfectly working functionality.

faeriechangling 3y ago
Besides what you mentioned there’s the local home SDK. Google is still using the actual Nest app and I’m pretty sure what you mentioned works through that app. There’s also matter now for local control. The thing is that there’s this mishmash because unlike Apple they weren’t local first across the board from the get go. In any case, I’m holding out for a HomePod mini refresh because if they throw a s9 chip in there it’s going to be able to do basic voice recognition offline Maybe matter can save Alexa/Google home and I’m too pessimistic but I don’t like how they work now.