Stop Spotify Connect from pausing when using phone mic

[emikoala]

Scenario: I have some music playing on a Nest Mini speaker, which was triggered by an Assistant routine. While it's playing I open up a language learning app on my Pixel (3a), and every time there's a speaking exercise and I press the mic button to answer, Nest Mini pauses the music until the mic turns off again. 

I suspect but don't know for sure this may have coincided with the recent Android update where now a green indicator light displays whenever the phone's mic is hot.

I could understand pausing if the music was playing out of my phone's speakers, or if I had pressed the mic input on the Assistant app or otherwise triggered Assistant itself via my phone. But when I'm playing music on Home speakers it's intended for more than just me to be listening to, and the language app could understand me just fine with the background noise, so I don't need or want the music to pause on Home speakers for everyone just because I'm speaking into my phone to something other than a Google input.

Is there any setting that can revert the behavior back to how it was before?

[kiltguy2112]

Is your phone set to respond to "Hey Google"? If it is, opening up the mic is probably setting all your home devices to listen so that the closest one can reply.

[emikoala]

Unfortunately not - between my Chromebook and all my Nest speakers I was getting too many instances where my phone AND another device both tried responding to me at home, so I disabled the phone trigger years ago.

[kiltguy2112]

If you start Spotify by asking the mini directly, is the behavior the same when you hit the phone mic? If not make it so the routine starts from the mini and not the phone. Starting the routine from the phone is probably casting Spotify to the mini as opposed to the mini playing Spotify on it's own.

[emikoala]

Ah, this sounds like a promising idea. It's my Good Morning routine, which is set to voice trigger and use whatever device started the routine for the audio... But I also have a custom routine that I use in tandem with my alarm to help wake me up. It time-triggered and turns up the volume really loud, puts the bedroom lights on full brightness, yells at me to get up, and then the final step is a "Custom Command" action where I've entered "Good Morning" to trigger the Good Morning routine. (This way I can still trigger Good Morning by my voice on weekends when I can sleep in, but have it started automatically on workdays when I need help getting moving at an ungodly early hour.)

 The custom routine has the audio set specifically to the bedroom speaker, because it only works when I'm at home, but the Good Morning routine has the audio set to "whichever device initiated the routine" - so it seems like being triggered by a custom routine is being interpreted as having been triggered by the phone which has the Home app installed, I suppose? I wonder if I could download the Home app to my work phone and edit the routine from that phone, and then perhaps Google would think that phone is the one triggering routines and I could use my personal phone freely.

[Jake]

Hey there,

Thanks for visiting the Community.

Since this thread hasn't had activity in a while, we're going to close it to keep content fresh. We hope you were able to get the help you need, but if the issue persists feel free to create a new thread, and provide as many details as possible so that others can lend a hand.

Best regards,
Jake