Google Home has got worse since 2020
I have a brace of Google Homes that I mostly use as smart speakers, timers, lighting controllers and occasionally for answering questions when neither I nor Mrs Chimp wants to get their phone out. They're certainly useful when your hands are full or you need to set a timer with hands too wet or dirty for a phone, but for about two years they've been getting worse, not better. Voice commands are misunderstood more frequently, with a particular case that there's a 50/50 chance of what will happen to the lights when I ask Google to turn them "out" instead of "off". They might go off, they might stay on. This is not a system that's learning my speech patterns. My partner's Irish accent fares even worse.
I thought it might just be us, until I discovered the Google Home subreddit. It's full of users complaining that the performance of their devices has declined. Reports from the Alexa camp suggest that it's more responsive, but too frequently tries to sell you things based on your queries.
As for answering questions, it's fine if you want to know basic facts, but if you try to ask any sort of nested or conditional question, the best you can hope for is instructions to look at a link on your phone. Which is exactly what I don't want to do, or can't do, when I'm asking the question.
If Google can't make money off these things, then its history suggests that it will withdraw investment, performance will decline, users will abandon the product and they'll be consigned to the great Google Skip. Perhaps that journey has already begun.