topic Re: Future of Family Bell? in Home Automation

Future of Family Bell?

AC22 — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 21:45:28 GMT

We are avid users of Family Bell for our family routines. I saw that it was being discontinued and all bells needed to be recreated in Routines, which I've completed, however some of my family bells are still active and working and I can still see it in the Google Home Settings. Does anyone know what is actually happening with family bell? I'd prefer to use it over routines for several reasons.

- Family bell allows for pausing during a date range for multiple bells at one time (ie - school break) where routines require you go through 1 by 1 and deactivate and save, then you must remember to go back in and reactivate before they are needed again.

- Family bell automatically adds a notification chime. I had to manually program in 3 chimes into my routines to try and closely match and then sometimes the prompts play over each other (for example, it will chime, announce the weather, & the custom announcement to leave for school all at the same time making it impossible to tell what it is saying).

- Family bell announcements could be identically matched on multiple speakers in the Home, but some features of the Routines can only be done on 1 device (for example, delightful chime).

Family bell saved my sanity during Covid and kept my kindergartener and 3rd grader on top of logging into their asynchronous classes. Since then it has them waking up and getting ready for school and after school activities without parental prompting. It has been a lifesaver and I hate to see it get discontinued. The replacement of Routines is not adequate.

Re: Future of Family Bell?

SmartHomeH-TAGS — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:33:01 GMT

Keep using while ever it's there.

It was supposed to stop at the end of February, but maybe Google received enough backlash that they reversed their decision.

Re: Future of Family Bell?

RowingWumpus — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 05:09:12 GMT

I still have functioning family bells and I can edit them and turn them off and on. The Family Bell page under assistant settings looks unchanged but I haven't tried to create any new bells for a long time. The message about them being discontinued disappeared from the page too.

Re: Future of Family Bell?

Ben-C — Wed, 14 May 2025 14:14:17 GMT

My Family Bells have been working on and off, until this week. I didn't even know they were being discontinued.

Now I've lost all my bells and have to recreate them as routines.

Re: Future of Family Bell?

Cassandwitch — Mon, 19 May 2025 18:16:36 GMT

How do I cause enough ruccous to get Google to bring Google nest back??? Me and the kids are so lost... 😭😭😭😭

Re: Future of Family Bell?

Jroper231 — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:18:05 GMT

I agree with you @AC22 family bell was far easier to update / pause as needed.