Google Home has broken music automations actions

[Jimh23]

For years now I've had an automation that played one of my own Spotify playlists in the morning, triggered by a time. Basically a morning alarm.

But now no matter what I write into the text box in the automation config it doesn't play the correct playlist. It does weird fuzzy matching and just plays an artist with a similar name. 

For a few days I had it working by prefixing "my playlist" before the title of the playlist but now that doesn't work either. 

I'm presuming some API has changed somewhere but the result of that has broken the functionality! 

Can this get fixed please? The description by the text box actually says you can enter a playlist!

[Bardickson]

Same issue. Same fixes tried.

For 3 years my "I'm home" routine had a si ple instruction to "shuffle chill playlist on [device]" and found my "chill" playlist no problem.

now decides to play random music.

I have changed the name of my playlist to make it unique and it just starts searching ever more random music, even less related to my playlist.

Have tried every variation of "my playlist" and speech marks. It either doesn't work at all. Or, more infuriating, it works once, then goes back to playing random music again.

What used to work easily has been broken for no benefit.

Thanks again google.

[luciaaa]

Hi there, 

Thank you so much for posting in the community. I’m truly sorry the routine you have with your playlist is not working. Certainly, this is not a common situation. Let’s work together!

To effectively troubleshoot, please provide me with the following information: 

• Do you have a Google Nest speaker or display? You can refer to this article to identify your device: Identify your Google Nest device. 
• Where are you located?
• Do you have the same problem when you cast directly from your streaming app?
• Does this inconvenience only occur with the playlist routine, or does it happen with your other routines?
• Is your streaming app plan the premium one?

This information will help me to provide you with accurate troubleshooting steps. 

For now, let's rule out that there is a glitch in the routine and that this is what is preventing the playlist from playing. Please follow the troubleshooting steps below:

1. Delete the current routine.
2. Create a new routine with different names.

For detailed instructions, please refer to this article: Create and manage routines for Google Home automations. 

Please let me know how it goes.

Best regards,

Ana

[Jimh23]

Helpful to know that it's not just me.

Annoyingly the description text directly underneath the textbox says that a playlist can be entered. Absolutely no good reason for this to be broken like this. It's called regression testing Google, there's no excuse for not doing it.

[digitalnatvusr]

Similar issue here at multiple times as this wasn't the first time my wake up alarm got "damaged" by somekind of update, recently I had my automation set so it reads out ["Wake Up Hour" private playlist on Spotify] under the media player option which is used as an alarm, noticed that it had stopped working on the 22nd of October 2024. However after multiple tests it seems the interpretation has been changed so it's reading the "private playlist" as a title of a song now. It appears it can only play single songs currently rather than a private playlist.

I'll run some more tests if i can do a uniquely named public playlist to see if i can get the automation to work with that.

[digitalnatvusr]

So have found a work around but it is a bit icky and just weird, is straight forward at least.

Create/modify a playlist in spotify so it's title is 10 or more characters, each characters is all randomised so you end up with something that looks like the YouTube's video ID in a HTTP link, then copy that then paste it into the google automation side of things like so, [(Playlist ID here) playlist]. So far tested both private and public versions of the playlists with different names and haven't noticed a difference.

It may look ugly and is a non-human friendly naming scheme but so far it appears to work... until another update between tomorrow or many many years down the line it breaks again, hopefully the solution is fixable by then.

[Jimh23]

Sadly that didn't work for me. I made a random string of characters as the playlist name and put it into the Google home automation textbox in the Home app. I tried having the word playlist both before and after and neither worked. 

Having 'playlist' first does seem to cause it to play the last thing I was playing on Spotify. So and this is even more icky than your solution, if just before I go to bed I start my morning playlist for a second or two it might pick that up in the morning...

[digitalnatvusr]

Did you had the text under the action "Try Adding Your Own" or "Play and Control Media"?

For me I have the text under the "play and control media" action rather than using the "Try adding your own" action, testing the latter action with the phrase [play "(playlistName)" playlist on Spotify] made caused it to error; but found that just doing [play "(playlistName)"] with Spotify set to your default music provider will work, even works without the speech marks (") from my testings.