Google Home and Nest users have been reporting issues with their gadgets, including misunderstanding commands, delayed responses and ignoring questions.
Google Home’s Chief Product Officer finally responded on X saying that they’re actively working on major improvements.
It’s been quite a week for Google Home and Nest smart home users. Over the past few days, many users have been reporting issues with their smart home devices, and Google has finally responded – but the answers to the issues are more cryptic than useful.
In a Reddit thread that started earlier this week, Google Home and Nest users were reporting and comparing issues that had arisen with their smart home devices. Many users had reported issues with their devices completely misunderstanding commands and coming up with random answers or simply saying “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again later.”
Other glitches included delayed responses or the Google Home and Nest smart speakers and displays completely ignoring instructions. But the strangest – and creepiest – issues were when Google would do something entirely different to the command given.
One user said after asking Google to turn off their fan, it turned off their lights instead, while another said they asked one speaker to play music and it started doing so in a completely different room on a different speaker. They were then unable to get that speaker to stop.
There have been many bugs and glitches to say the least, and it seems to be across many of Google’s smart home devices, and not just its older models. Many have speculated that it could be to do with Google ignoring their existing hardware and shifting their attention elsewhere – mainly towards its upcoming Gemini integration.
The response from Google was pretty quiet until now. Google Home and Nest’s Chief Product Officer, Anish Kattukaran posted on X acknowledging the recent feedback and apologising for the Google Assistant reliability issues on smart home devices.
Kattukaran went on to say “we hear you loud and clear and are committed to getting this right — and making sure we have a long term solution that provides better reliability and capability. We have been actively working on major improvements for [some time] and will have more to share in the fall.”
This response hasn’t exactly given any concrete details regarding what’s been going wrong and what’s going to be done about it. It could be a hint that Google is producing new smart home gadgets but that leaves questions over whether older hardware will be updated or phased out.
If it’s the latter, it’ll be bad news for users who have multiple Google Home or Nest devices and have built an entire smart home ecosystem on it, so we hope that’s not the case. Regardless, it seems like it’ll be a while yet until we get any more updates.
