I agree, I went all in on nest hubs/minis etc to have assistant for making requests to control stuff. I've got a bunch of Xiaomi and custom sensors and other devices hooked up to home assistant with a relay through to Google (that I've had to pay for...because Google's home ecosystem is just fucking terrible, anybody could do better with their eyes closed).

I've noticed over time that assistant has become much dumber, is prone to misunderstanding what you say, Google sucks at hardware their wifi antennas are total crap, any minor latency between multiple assistant devices will result in them all trying to respond rather than the closest one, it's just a nightmare.

I haven't done any personal projects in a long time but I think it's about time I start playing with the OpenAI apis + whisper and see if I can't build a better assistant.