GoogleAssistant - Home

Too many The Googles

I reached peak saturation with Google recently and have run into some interesting issues. Maybe interesting only to me, and your experience may vary, but here’s what’s happening to me.

TL:DR some oddness in Paul’s Googlesphere.

The first issue is having a couple of phones on my account (while I’m testing out the Doogee S90,) if they both hear “ok google,” you can forget about the Google Home units doing anything. Having one phone intercepting “ok google,” didn’t seem to do this however I’d always get a message that another device was handling this.

Solution obviously is to wrap the second phone in tin foil or disable hotword detection.

The second involves the nearest device not hearing me and something on the other side of the house registering where I can’t imagine it sounded like anything louder than a whispers of a long dead man.

Me in kitchen “ok google, show me a recipe for Guinness Pie”
Upstairs bedroom Google Home: “OK, playing the Beach Boys”

Uh no. The far field microphones need some abilities to tweak them. I’m not sure if voice recognition improved or if my house got quieter, but it’s significantly harder to not get picked up in a different room the past week or two.

Some other odd things have been happening lately with the addition of the Nest systems. Both the Lenovo and the Google Home Hub have locked up during camera switching.

What’s odd, perhaps unrelated, I can’t reproduce this if a second display unit in the house is off. Not sure if they’re doing some sort of “I got it I got it” dance or what.

I can usually trigger something going wrong by asking to show the front yard, show the back yard, show the door, show the back yard and boop. Lock, reboot, or completely ignores and goes back to the main screen.

Interesting times.

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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