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Terrible Family Bell and Reminders make Nest Hub worthless

TheUbermensch
Community Member

I bought two of these to manage reminders for the kids. They promote a feature called Family Bell so that kids can check off their chores. The idea is that you can set an alert that then prompts the kids to check off their chores at a scheduled time. Unfortunately, this service doesn't work in real-world scenarios.

There are only two multi-step checklists that can be triggered. Why they would do this makes zero sense. They built the capability, but limit it to two step-by-step checklists so that pretty much makes it useless. It is almost like they created the feature for a trade show and then said let's move on to something else.

Therefore, I cannot have a different checklist for our four kids. In addition, the two checklists can only have 8 steps which means I can't even efficiently add one checklist with a bunch of steps for all of the kids.

So, I then tried to use reminders that I assign to family members of the home. I see a video of someone using a nest hub to assign reminders to members of the family... Maybe that will work. After setting up all of the family members which is the most confusing setup possible, the Nest Hub says it cannot assign reminders. I look in the assistant settings and assignable reminders are an option, but they no longer work.

It turns out that Google stopped supporting assignable reminders earlier this year. So basically, this is completely incapable of doing what it has advertised.

Also, it is important to point out that almost no Android apps can be installed on this thing so it is pretty much a worthless paperweight. If I want this to play Spotify, then it works. Otherwise, Google is pretty much falsely advertising functionality.

So my hope os that they have some plans for this paperweight, but we all know Google's history with regard to tasks and reminders so now I have to decide whether I return these things.

1 REPLY 1

Jimmy_J
Community Member

these HUBS are a total waste of money.  shame on google.  i have $20 tablets that have more functionality. check out the Amazon Echo Show 15.  Lots of features!