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Lazarus
Community Specialist
Community Specialist

Greetings, smart home enthusiasts!

Based on invaluable input from the Google Nest community and feedback from our own internal trials, we're expanding the use of chimes to acknowledge smart home commands to control devices in the same room. For those who've asked for fewer verbal responses, this one's for you!

 

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So what does this look like?
To provide an example of how this will work, let's say you want to use Google Home to turn on the fan in the room you're in. After you've said, "Ok Google, turn on the fan," rather than hearing a verbal response like, "Ok, turning on fan," from the speaker / smart display, you'll instead hear a pleasant chime to confirm that Google is turning on your fan.

This functionality is already available for lights in the same room, but we'll be rolling out the use of chimes for additional devices in the next few weeks:

  • Outlets
  • Switches
  • TVs
  • Speakers
  • Fans
  • Blinds
  • And more!

Your feedback is very important to us, so continue to let us know what functionality you'd like to see to make your smart home work even more seamlessly for your needs. The best place to discuss your experience is our Home Automation forum  there, you can share your home automations, troubleshoot routines, and connect with other smart home enthusiasts about how you're creating and customizing your helpful home. We've already started a discussion about expanded chimes usage over there we invite you to join us and leave your feedback!

 

The Google Nest team

13 Comments
RXShorty
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

This is a very welcome feature! Sweet!

IngerDi
Community Member

I live alone in a very rural area.  I am 76 and I enjoy having Google reply. We should be given a choice, otherwise you are just like Amazon forcing changes with Echo. Not happy, don't want more chimes in my life,

EmptyNester
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

I strongly agree with IngerDi,  Stop make changes to how something works and instead offer new options in the software, But don't change the way something works as there will always be people that like things just the way they are.

nunya
Community Member

When the wifi is down or a device has lost network connectivity instead of talking over the user it should make a failed chime.

 

The other is the ability to use custom chimes.

ABluePelicanCat
Community Member

Can we also have chimes rather than "Playing XXXXX" or when I do send feedback, just go ahead and send it, don't then ask "shall I send it?!!" You don't need further permission to send my feedback if I asked you to send it in the first place! 

And more options for voices would be great. From what I can work out we have the option of a condescending sounding woman, or a overly happy 20 year old male. I'm not finding either of them very endearing... can we have a few celeb/famous actors or orator options please? Sat-navs seem to have made it work and they came about years and years ago now. AI should have advanced enough to get a good enough imitation by now, surely?

Oh and there should be a way to tap a button if your machine reacts when you didn't say anything or when a person sounding nothing like you was responded to. Rather than have to mess around with asking the machine to 1. stop, 2 wait for it to stop, 3, send feedback and 4. agree to "send it". It's too much effort! A simple tap or even pattern of taps to register an incorrect response would be far faster and less irritating. 

Linkjuice
Community Member

I think this will be something people actually use especially for turning on the lights when they get home  or enter a dark room. Changing the playback to chimes makes sense as long as they it is loud enough. I personally wont be using this anytime soon but I'm sure a lot of people will.

PedroLiberal
Community Member

@Lazarus not a bad idea but please do not roll this like you guys did for the lights. Make it so that users can decide whether or not they want to use the chimes, or not, and for which devices. It’s bloody annoying when you unilaterally change the behavior of the google Assistant and you don’t even respect that some users might not like the change. Don’t take choice away from users. Give it to us instead. Let us decide if we want to use the chime, and for which devices. Please!

LorenzoA
Community Member

This is a nice step forward, although it's almost 5 years behind when many of us said that this should have been done. Even worse, you're only turning the talking off for the room that people are in. A lot of people have been saying that you should be able to disable talking back for all rooms of the house. Maybe have an option in the settings where people can have it talk back for every device and then disable it for every device or have no chimes or have some chimes give people the power of choice. I have to have both Smart speakers in my house because at night, I'd rather talk to Alexa and have her turn off my light without leaving me feedback, instead of Google Assistant who feels like she has to reiterate the command that I just said. It'd be nice also when playing music for the smart assistant not have to tell me what song it's going to play. Just play it. Both Amazon and Google devices seem to want to have to tell you what song it's going to play and what service it's from. Just do it and shut up.

Mary73
Community Member

I do not understand why we need feedback at all. We can see if the light is turned off or not. 


I also do not understand why there isn’t a choice to make the assistant more or less verbose.
For me, the feedback is overwhelming. 


I prefer to be able to have its verbosity on an out of 5 setting. Such as:

“Hey Google, set verbal feedback to zero.”

Or if I’m unsure as to why a light, plug etc isn’t working:

“Hey Google, set verbal feedback to 5.”

 

 

Same with the chimes, except they would be an on or off.

//<If audio input= off then chime=0> 

MasterOfObvious
Community Member

The assistant should *never* talk to me unless I've asked it for information.

Telling it to do something is not an invitation to talk to me.

  • Have a success chime, a partial success chime, and a failure chime.
  • Allow us to set the volume for chimes to a level that won't disturb sleeping people in the next room.
  • Allow us to ask what went wrong if we hear a partial-success or failure chime.
  • Don't spam my phone with notifications I didn't ask for directly.

I *really* hate asking the thing to turn out the lights only to be told about certain lights being unavailable. My wife turned off the light switch my plugs are attached to. Now she's awake because I asked the Assistant to turn off all the lights in the house, the volume was set to 7, and the assistant thought 1AM was a great time to tell me about it.

People have been complaining about this for years. Google needs to pay more attention to feedback.

BravoSix
Community Member

I appreciate what you're doing here.  But there are significantly more important features that need to be added such as the ability to display a camera on my phone using a voice command and the ability to disable notifications for familiar faces (it's astounding that this functionality still doesn't exist - it's literally the entire purpose of familiar face detection).

BJJohnson
Community Member

Why is it so difficult to just give everyone the option to turn chimes on wherever they'd like? I would prefer to never hear "okay, <completing the action you just asked me to>" again, no matter what room I am in. Seems like something one guy could develop within a week. Something like:

Chimes:

Current room

All rooms [x]

 

Don't be Apple; give us the ability to customize and tailor our products.

Dickie
Community Member

Why not just give users the option?!

1. Verbal response

2. Chime

3. Off