I just wanted to see what kind of garbage they were serving up these days. You hear about all this sophisticated AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, but sometimes you gotta check the basics. Are they just serving up the same old fortune cookie nonsense?
Setting Up The Test: The Prompt
I wasn’t going to trust some online article about it, you know? I wanted the real, raw data. So, I walked right into the kitchen, the sunlight hitting the speaker just right. I took a deep breath and I just blurted out the test command, nice and slow.
“Ok Google, tell me my Virgo daily horoscope.”
There was that usual little click sound, the one that tells you the machine heard you, but the gears are still turning. Then, the voice. It’s always so smooth and just a tiny bit spooky. It came back at me with the standard preamble, talking about the cosmic energies aligning or whatever. It’s always vague enough to be relevant to literally anyone breathing.
For the first few days, I just listened. One day, it was all about communication: “Virgo, today is a day to speak your truth and clarify misunderstandings.” The next day, it was about caution with money: “Keep your wallet close and avoid impulsive purchases.” I tracked the source—or tried to. It all cycles back to some syndicated feed that probably hasn’t been updated since 2018. It’s not learning anything, it’s just reading a slightly shuffled deck of generic advice.
But then, I decided to actually log it. Not just listen, but transcribe and record the exact audio of ten consecutive days. I had to know if there was any real variation or if it was just five basic scripts on rotation.
Why Ten Days? The Real Story
Now, why in the heck would a grown person spend ten days keeping an audio log of a stupid horoscope? The answer isn’t technical, trust me. It goes back to when everything felt like it was spinning out of control.
It was late in ’23, right when I finally got the green light on that big house purchase. We moved out of the old place fast. I mean, really fast. My wife and kid went ahead to stay with her parents while I drove the moving truck across three states. Everything felt rushed and fragile, like one wrong turn on the freeway would break every single thing we owned.
I finally got to the new city, parked the truck, and went to pick up the keys. The guy who was supposed to meet me? No show.
I called. No answer. I emailed. Bounce back. Turns out the whole deal—the paperwork, the contract, the closing date—it was all a big, fat, messy lie. The house wasn’t ready. The lawyer was suddenly gone. I was sitting there, stranded in a truck full of our entire lives, with no place to put it and my family due to fly in the next morning.
- The moving company was calling me demanding a delivery address.
- My wife was calling, asking if the beds were set up yet.
- My phone battery was dying because I was in a panic trying to find a lawyer who would actually answer.
It was absolute chaos. Everything I had trusted—the banks, the contracts, the lawyers, the agents—every single one of them failed at the most critical moment. I ended up crashing in a super grimy, overpriced motel that night, staring at the ceiling and trying not to lose my mind.
The next morning, I woke up, totally drained. The first thing I did, purely out of habit, was reach for my phone and call up Google Assistant. I didn’t even think about it, I just needed some kind of signal that the world was still working on some level. I whispered it, sitting on the edge of that gross motel bed.
“Ok Google, tell me my Virgo daily horoscope.”
It responded, instantly. No questions, no lawyers, no delays. It just ran the script. That day, it told me something about “unforeseen challenges leading to personal growth” and to “trust my gut.”
The Lesson Learned
The routine became a weird kind of anchor for two weeks. While I was fighting banks, fighting movers, and frantically trying to find another place before my wife walked in the door, the only thing that showed up on time and did exactly what I told it to do was that stupid assistant and its generic horoscope. That’s why I started logging it. I needed proof that one thing in my life was still capable of executing a simple command reliably.
The outcome of the search? It’s exactly what you’d expect: a computer reading a recycled text file. But the experience I got from it? That was totally unexpected. It taught me that sometimes, you stop looking for the sophisticated answer and just cling to the thing that simply and predictably works.
