When I started using a Google smart speaker six years ago, I was all in. Voice assistants have never been perfect—in fact, they always kind of sucked—but I found (having also used Alexa and Siri) that Google Assistant sucked just a little bit less than the competition. And the fact that it was actually linked to Google search for real web queries made it even better. Flash forward to now, and everything I just wrote couldn’t be further from the truth.

Things are arguably worse for the Google Assistant and Google’s entire smart home ecosystem than they’ve ever been, and the transition (or full-on enshittification, if you’re feeling spicy) into the dumpster was seemingly fast. As a result of that dysfunction, people who use the Google Home platform as their hub for smart home products like lights, cameras, and speakers have been pouring their frustrations onto forums like Reddit en masse over the past month.

For those not-so-happy customers, the Google Home app seemed to be flat-out broken, meaning some affected couldn’t even turn their lights on or off. When I say shit was broken, I mean shit was broken. Those problems were, in fact, so bad that Google addressed issues publicly on social media and promised to do better. Things did not improve, however. Issues for lots of people have persisted, and last week, news of a possible class action lawsuit started to percolate. Yikes.

Hey everyone, I want to acknowledge the recent feedback about Google Assistant reliability on our home devices. I sincerely apologize for what you're experiencing and feeling!

— Anish Kattukaran (@AnishKattukaran) July 23, 2025

If you haven’t been using Google products for your smart home needs, it may seem surprising that Google could so suddenly and rapidly drop the ball on an entire ecosystem of hardware and software. If you have been using Google Home and Google Assistant for your smart home needs, however, you’re less likely to be surprised by the recent fallout. As someone who has been in this ecosystem, I can say from experience that recent blowback isn’t the product of some bug or anything spontaneous, for that matter; it feels more like the product of years of erosion and neglect.

The complaints over Google Home and Google Assistant date back so far that I initially ignored recent issues bubbling up on forums. More dissatisfaction with Google Assistant? In my line of work, we call that a day that ends in “y.” And I’m not the only one. I’m just going to quote this full post below, not because it’s special, but because it’s a common complaint—a part that summarizes the whole.

One Redditor wrote on r/GoogleHome two months ago:

“It used to be amazing. Then it started being more and more unreliable for activation. Then not being useful at all for opening times. Then being useless for pretty much any question that involves some thinking. Now I can’t even stop a timer that is actively going off because it thinks that nothing’s playing. I’m so tired of it.”

It’s hard to say when the slide toward the garbage bin started to happen; maybe it was when Google stopped collecting and listening to people’s voice commands years ago; maybe it was when Google started to pivot more towards chatbots and generative AI, leaving its other platforms to rot; maybe the whole Google Home team got locked in some Severance-style room inside of Google’s Mountain View HQ and no one has been able to find them for a few years. Regardless of how we got here, the fact that we’re here now of all times feels almost ironic.

By Google’s estimation—and the estimation of competitors like Amazon and Apple—this is supposed to be a golden age of voice assistants. Thanks to large language models, voice assistants are supposed to get a major glow-up and should be more capable of understanding natural language and multistep commands. Maybe that will still happen, but for now, all of that promise is still in the future, with Siri delayed and Amazon’s Alexa+ idling in early access. I don’t know, maybe you just have to hit rock bottom in order to make progress, but at this point, it’s hard to take Google’s word for it, so all we’re left with is a broken home, so to speak. From the outside, it looks to me like Google’s smart home empire is crumbling, and for the sake of all of us and our stupid smart lights, I hope a fix is in sight.