Reporting bug to Google, forehead learns desk is hard
I try and make the world better. Really I do. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I make the mistake of trying to report something to Google and learning pretty quickly there’s a wall between me and anyone who might remotely be benefitted by the information I have gathered.
My current scenario was an attempt to submit a series of experiments and trials I had conducted about Look and Talk failing in certain circumstances and how to reproduce. The very very short version of this is that when you’re using Nest Aware / Home/Away Assist to turn off security monitoring of your camera at home, Look and Talk will work for one cycle, then be disabled. Simple little logic error I’m assuming.
Not world ending, but I have a gob of text on how to reproduce this and while I’ve been on phones trace typing and such for years, I’m not typing that out in the Home App under feedback. The other option is to tell an Assistant to send feedback and tell it up to 90 seconds worth of feedback. I have yet to get more than 30 seconds of feedback into a Google Home/Nest/Hub before it just goes ahead and sends it, and if I near 90 I get “hrrrmmm something went wrong.”
So I asked Google Support via chat for an email address or web form I could just cut and paste what is wrong and what I did to ensure that it’s them, not me.
The first person I was connected to was in the wrong department… told me he was going to transfer me to the right department. About 8 minutes later he said he had not heard from me and asked if I was still there. I informed him that yes, I was, I was just waiting for him to transfer me as he hadn’t asked me a question and just told me he was.
I get transferred to someone in the Hub department. I state clearly that I have a bug report, just looking for the location to submit a huge wad of text on how to reproduce it, etc. I’m told they understand how frustrating it is and am asked if I reset my Hub Max. I reiterate that I’m not looking for a solution to the problem, I’m looking to send an incredibly detailed listing of how to reproduce the issue to a developer.
I’m told I can send voice feedback.. no. I can send text feedback in the app… no… more attempts to fix the problem, more me asking if there’s any way I can get an answer to “where’s the place I can send a large amount of text and have a developer of the Nest Hub Max look at it.” I assume it’s an easy fix, but it’s not going to be fixed by me resetting my plunger or power cycling my wife’s phone, which is how these support transactions generally go.
No seriously Google, it’s you, not me.
Oh yeah, there’s a whole part in there about how once this happens that the on/off Nest Home access fails also making the thing appear useless as a security camera if you had Look and Talk enabled… this was fairly detailed. Not me just saying “it broke, fikkit!” (this part is a web issue, not a Hub issue)
I’m finally directed to Developers.google.com as the only place that someone might look at it. I ask if I’m just supposed to post somewhere on that site and hope and that’s evidently a yes. There’s no easy path to submit a bug report, and once again there’s no way to talk to a chat support operative without them asking if you factory reset your device it appears.
Not even directed to a sub forum…
