Google Nest Speakers will not play news or stream radio

[boogers]

The speaker receives and confirms the command to play news feeds, or stream live radio, but consistently fails. eg

• Command: 'play the latest news' used to work, but is now followed with 'Here's the latest news. Something went wrong. When you're ready, give it another try.' 100% retry failure rate
• Command: 'Stream ABC News Radio' used to work, but is now followed with 'Streaming ABC News Radio from iHeartRadio. Something went wrong. When you're ready, give it another try.' 100% retry failure rate
• These commands work correctly for mobile devices
• Nest speakers affected: Nest Hub Max, Nest Audio

Any ideas fam? These devices have been factory reset and routines have been created to work around the problem, to no avail.

Thanks,

boogers

[aperezdeleon]

Hi there boogers,
 
Thanks for reaching out to our community.
 
It can be frustrating that your speakers cannot play the news on your favorite radios. Let's see what is going on.
 
Do you seem to have trouble with any other stations or services besides iHeartRadio? Try playing news from a different source and let me know if that works.
 
Make sure your Nest Hub Max and Nest Audio are within 15-20 feet of your Wi-Fi router and that your network isn't experiencing high traffic. Weak Wi-Fi signals or congested networks can prevent your Nest devices from communicating properly and lead to error codes.
 
While you've already performed a factory reset, I recommend trying to link and unlink your iHeartRadio service again. This can help ensure a successful connection without needing another reset.
 
Let me know how it goes.
 
Regards,
Angel.

[rickjforbes]

Hi Angel @aperezdeleon 

I notice you are active on forums but you have ghosted me on my post after you posted. I need to understand what you meant as your comment was unclear. I have tagged you multiple times, please do me the courtesy of a reply
https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Speakers-and-Displays/Your-quot-Higher-Support-quot-quot-Engi...

[boogers]

Apologies for the delay! I've been away.

Thanks for the suggestions, I've been sure to test everything. No changes in behaviour 😞
I work in IT so am pretty familiar with the ecosystem. Anything else I can do that's perhaps more advanced, or is it worthwhile contacting Google directly for product support?

[rickjforbes]

Network congestion a likely red herring.

Each puck designed to handle 100 devices and overall network 300 devices.

An audio stream is low bandwith. Look at the per device data rate when running.

Location of devices also red herring unless you have moved them post set-up, setup process SHOULD verify location is suitable.

Network management and channels is supposed to be automatic so remember that if you are asked to fiddle with this, it's not doing it's job.

This is the general advice page (no I.T experience required 🙌) take note if they contradict it

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7182840?hl=en#:~:text=We%20recommend%20a%20maximum%20of....

[boogers]

I totally agree with you! I, like many IT support professionals used to live and thrive on throwing out red herrings in support forums 🤣

This has been helpful, but not conducive to a solution. Support Team, please do not treat 

[boogers]

... us like absolute monsters.

[rickjforbes]

@boogers I noticed you used speakers (plural)
So suggest you catch up with this thread if you haven't already.

https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Speakers-and-Displays/Having-trouble-with-Speaker-groups-Read...

Google's products are sadly, increasingly riddled with bugs and faulty development (which is surprising given the company scale) but starting to become... somewhat expected for me and some others, based on a wide range of products and very similar "troubleshooting" experience whether direct or in the forums. They certainly seem to put on a show of gathering data, but I have never had anything other than "off-the-shelf" resets, reboots, basic stuff, after such data gathering. I believe Google's contact centres refer to this process as "troubleshooting" which is not entirely unfair, however the suggestions are often onerous, or involved for the user, or do not match the problem, they often show a lack of understanding for the intended/designed function. They never action something their side that makes a difference. The problems really start if troubleshooting does not resolve the issue, after this my experience over many cases is entirely that escalations and bugs that need to be passed back to the devs never go anywhere, the customer comms end there and cases close automatically after 90 days.
I'd be delighted to hear if you have a different experience, but with the resources Google has, I have to believe this is an active choice by management, rather than a successful company and product overwhelmed by it's own successes.

Check out my thread above, best of luck.
https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Speakers-and-Displays/Your-quot-Higher-Support-quot-quot-Engi...

Rich

[boogers]

Thanks!

I've resolved the issue. Personalised Results needed to be enabled for the affected speakers. It was previously turned off.

How much do you google help team get paid?

[rickjforbes]

Great news!
Yeah, I don't blame the contact centre operation, I think they are 3rd party contact centre partners anyway. I blame the organisation at the centre. The information provided for self-help and troubleshooting is within their control, as is how they cluster and prioritise tickets based on user-feedback, unresolved contact tickets.

I have an issue with wrong device answering, it results in "hilarious" interactions like this.
Viudeo (https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7257763?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid#zippy=%2Cstep...)
I think this is linked to a setting on the phone (Pixel) which is bugged (my settings are correct)
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7257763?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid#zippy=%2Cstep...

But they are unable to go beyond the canned steps, or join up functionality across the ecosystem, the support is arranged into silo'd hardware centric divisions