Google Assistant Commands: Very Buggy
Hi, just started using the Astiga feature for Google Assistant as found here:
Things I noticed after a few hours of messing with it:
- It's harder than I thought it'd be to say "astiga"!! some times it heard "as Tiga" and "a Stiga"
- Some songs searched better than others. "Trying My Best" by Anson Seabra always worked. When I said "Hey Google, ask astiga to play Golden", "Golden" by Fall Out Boy never worked, instead it played "Hey, Soul Sister" by Train, likely because the album is called "Save Me, San Francisco (Golden Gate Edition). On the astiga web player, albums show up before tracks, so that might be why it always played the wrong song.
Note: saying "ask astiga to play Golden by Fall Out Boy" always failed. It always responded with something like "could not find a song called 'Golden by Fall Out Boy'", but saying "play Golden Fall Out Boy" always worked. This is also true of the web player's search box.
- Playing by artist always worked for me. It just shuffled the songs randomly by the artist just by saying "to play [artist]"
- There's a slight lag, maybe about 3-5 seconds before a song starts
- In between every single song, it will announce what song is playing. I found this obnoxious.
- Commands such as "skip" or "play next song" always resulted in "could not find a further song matching [insert whatever was searched for earlier]" which should not have happened considering if I didn't skip, more songs would have played (for example, if I had all of an artists songs playing)
- Every now and then it would say "could not find a song matching 'astiga to'" regardless of what I searched.
- Album shuffle started to work.. and then dropped out sometimes.
- Shuffling the whole library is impossible
- Playing from playlists is impossible
There are still many things left for me to try, I might update this later. Curious as to what others have found! Has anyone else ran into these problems? I find that overall, the commands feel very clunky. Hope to see them improved and/or updated!
Post edited by Monnes on
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Next week there will be a conference about Google Assistant, where they will hopefully announce some new things for the Google Assistant:
The current system is a bit clunky due to limitations from Astiga's and Google's side. I hope to see support for adding custom media streaming services, instead of the precurated list that's currently available (which consists of Spotify, YouTube Music and a couple of others). That would mean you'd be able to select Astiga as default media service, and more things would work as you'd expect them to work (as it currently requires reinventing the wheel, which, as you noticed, doesn't always work the way it should).
By the way, I have to announce each song, as Google disallows playing more than one media file without text in between.
That makes a lot more sense when you put it this way. I appreciate the quick and detailed response. Will definitely check back every now and then to see for some updates.
@Koen How did that conference go? I went to watch it but you have to register and I wasnt going to do that. This post answered several of my own questions actually.
I manged to work around some of the issues by creating a custom routine in google home and calling that instead of astiga directly. The routine then basically just runs 'ask astiga to play playlist xx'.
Admittedly, your milage may vary because you need to hard-code the command you want to run in advance, but this perfectly fits my own use case since I only have one playlist and just add whatever songs I want there.
That said, I'm curious as well if anything new came up at the last developer day.
Not yet it seems, but I will have to look into it more closely.