[Google Assistant] Bad and inconsistent behavior

[lfs]

Plan

Family

Country

Sweden

Device

Pixel 3

Operating System

Android 10 (fully updated)

My Question or Issue

When asking Google Assistant to play music on Spotify, the behavior is very inconsistent, and more often than not, it fails to play anything.

I try different commands, like "play Spotify", "play music", "play (artist) (on spotify)", "play (album) (on spotify)", and Google Assistant seems to recognize them correctly; even saying just "play (album)" usually prints the right album and artist information and Spotify icon, but that's about where good experience ends.

The outcome of a command is highly variable, but most frequently Spotify refuses to open at all or opens but doesn't play. If I just say "play Spotify/music" and it even opens Spotify, it most frequently goes to the search screen and does nothing else. If I specify an artist or album it will open the respective page but fail to play any song. Sometimes any of these commands will play a song, but it's like less than 20% of the time, being generous here.

I couldn't see any relation to the failure ratio with different aspects like phone being locked or not, using headphones or not, triggering the Assistant from the headset button, squeezing the phone or triggering it from the UI.

This issue is long standing, for months already, and I found other similar reports around the forums and the internet (Reddit, etc), so it seems to be a real issue, one that is unaddressed for more than a year.

I can help with troubleshooting, logs and stuff if possible, as long as this gets taken care of.