Is anyone else finding Google Assistant very slow to respond? I have a Sonos One in Australia and with Alexa it would respond to a question in around 1s. Ever since Google Assistant was released here i find that the Google Assistant would take 3-5s to respond. Its much slower than Alexa and also compared to the Google Mini i have.
Does anyone else have this issue? or a solution to it.
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+6I'm having the same problem here. It's not the only drawback of using the Google Assistant on the Sonos One though, as the Google Assistant on it cannot shuffle songs, imagine that!
Because of the limited functionality of the GA on Sonos and the slow response times (if it responds at all, that is) I've now just bought a Google Home Mini to control my Sonos One. Silly, I know, but the best 'solution' I could find.
Just to remind you, you can't set a preferred speaker with the Google Home app.
I'd also recommend never to buy into Google speakers if you plan to play music from Spotify directly on them, the streaming quality (bitrate) is terrible, that is to say unacceptable! It's fine when you tell the Home Mini to play music on the One though as the Google speaker simply sends the command to the Sonos. Play Spotify directly on the One is fine too.
Here's how to tell the Google Home Mini to shuffle music on your Sonos One in case you get one:
Me: "Shuffle "
GA: "Shuffling on Spotify"
Me: "Play on Sonos" - playback will start on Sonos One
What you can't do is this:
"Shuffle on Sonos"
That way the Google Assistant will play a playlist on your Sonos One but won't shuffle it. Telling it to shuffle after issuing the command won't work either, so always follow the steps above.
Hope this helped at least a bit 🙁
Because of the limited functionality of the GA on Sonos and the slow response times (if it responds at all, that is) I've now just bought a Google Home Mini to control my Sonos One. Silly, I know, but the best 'solution' I could find.
Just to remind you, you can't set a preferred speaker with the Google Home app.
I'd also recommend never to buy into Google speakers if you plan to play music from Spotify directly on them, the streaming quality (bitrate) is terrible, that is to say unacceptable! It's fine when you tell the Home Mini to play music on the One though as the Google speaker simply sends the command to the Sonos. Play Spotify directly on the One is fine too.
Here's how to tell the Google Home Mini to shuffle music on your Sonos One in case you get one:
Me: "Shuffle "
GA: "Shuffling on Spotify"
Me: "Play on Sonos" - playback will start on Sonos One
What you can't do is this:
"Shuffle on Sonos"
That way the Google Assistant will play a playlist on your Sonos One but won't shuffle it. Telling it to shuffle after issuing the command won't work either, so always follow the steps above.
Hope this helped at least a bit 🙁
I am having the same issue google is slow to respond on beam and then 2mi s later it is perfect the next time I ask something like turning the lights on it says “sorry there is a problem” but the lights turn on anyway
can anyone suggest anything ?
When using Google Assistant on my Beam, it takes 20+ seconds before it answers me.. It’s worthless this way..
Same problem. I’ve had google mini for ages and it works no problem. On sonos one gen 2 it’s unusable as it’s so delayed.
Same here, have a One and recently purchased a Beam. Was excited to hear GA was coming to Sonos after using Alexa since I first bought the One, especially because from everything I read, GA was a superior voice assistant.
From my experience since switching to GA, response times are crazy slow compared to Alexa. Similar experience to OP, Alexa would respond and action a command within a couple of seconds, GA takes close to 10sec after a command to action it (if at all; commands to play music are quite hit and miss).
Although frustrating, I might have to use the Google Mini workaround.
Same here… got one as a gift for Christmas (for my wife) and am about 1-day from returning it… it is unusable in the current state and I would not recommend anyone to buy a SONOS that is actually wanting to use the google assistant functionality.
10-15 second for responses.
Frequent misinterpretations
sometimes it hears fine (according to google) but just chooses not to respond.
It is like living with an 80-year old that has not put her hearing aid in…
As a speaker it is good. But that’s not what I paid for and not what I wanted. Really bad product development here Sonos… the cheaper google home minis do a better job and they cost 1/10th of the price :-(
Same here. 30-60 seconds to get a response out of the google assistant, and 90-95% of the time, that response is simply ‘there was a glitch, please try again,’ or ‘something went wrong, please try again.’ Completely unusable w/ Google Assistant at this point. I’ve tried contacting Sonos support & got nowhere with them. I’ll be returning the device. Such a shame. It would have been a great product otherwise.
Really dissatisfied with the google assistant on this speaker. It’s put me off investing further unless it’s resolved. 1/10th of the price will get you a google mini that operates better.. then buy an old play 1!
jlwachter83 wrote:
Same here. 30-60 seconds to get a response out of the google assistant, and 90-95% of the time, that response is simply ‘there was a glitch, please try again,’ or ‘something went wrong, please try again.’ Completely unusable w/ Google Assistant at this point. I’ve tried contacting Sonos support & got nowhere with them. I’ll be returning the device. Such a shame. It would have been a great product otherwise.
I don’t know what causes this problem, but perhaps my experience can help someone.
I’m in Canada, but I use U.S. Sonos and Google accounts, so I installed Google Assistant in place of Alexa as soon as it was released. Alexa was working fine, and I have other Google and Alexa speakers, but I just wanted to re-arrange things with Google Assistant on Sonos.
At first I frequently had the problem that Google Assistant would often have long delays in responding. I would speak a command, the white LED on my Sonos One would flash for a second (as it usually does while interpreting a command), then it would freeze with the LED on solid for 10-15 seconds before responding. I interpreted this as Google’s servers being slow to respond, but of course there is no guide to what the LED signals. I complained about it a few times, but no answers were ever forthcoming. A few months later the problem suddenly cleared up and all responses came quickly, and that particular problem has not come back.
Then in mid-December, a new problem: suddenly more than half my voice commands to Google Assistant on Sonos would cause it to freeze with the white LED on for a full 60 seconds, then respond “There was a glitch” (or various things like that). Google routines with several commands would almost never complete successfully, even if they obviously started correctly and should have been proceeding with no further input from my local Sonos speaker. Again, no explanation could be found (and I did investigate thoroughly). Even rebooting the speakers and the router many times, changing LAN IP addresses, switching to Alexa temporarily (still fine) and back to GA, and operating with an ethernet connection instead of WiFi didn’t help. One day there was a brief general power failure and everything on the network rebooted in random order, and suddenly the problem was gone and hasn’t come back. I still have no good guess about what went wrong.
It's good to see that it's been 5 months and Google assistant basically doesn't work.
Still delayed, still doesn't understand well and now can't even get it to play Spotify.
I wonder if they didn't even bother to support this assistant since they planned to sue Google.
+18There is some delay, yes, but since I cannot compare GA to Alexa I cannot say if Alexa works any faster.
What I can say is that GA generally works well and is certainly capable of starting Spotify. It has some quirks though. I have GA coupled with Philips Hue and one of my rooms there wil not switch of if I use a certain phrase. In the GA app I can see GA understands me (it shows “lights on the patio off”, the phrase I use in Dutch - my native language) but it’s response is “I wil turn two lights on”. Another quirk is that some Hue-command wil be acknowledged by a “bong”, while others will be acknowledged by a phrase. And sometimes “Hey Google, lights out in the attic” will result in GA quoting Wikipedia about a book with that title (again, in Dutch).
Yes, that’s all very common behavior. Among other things, one of the minor faults with Google Assistant is that it sometimes spontaneously loses the association between the speaker and a specific room, in which case it foolishly interprets the command “turn on/off the light” as “turn on/off ALL lights”.
GA on my Sonos did go through a spell of very slow responses in the first few months - it would sit there with the white light on solid for about 10 seconds before it started to flash and process the command, as if it didn’t realize I was finished speaking. But after a few months that problem seemed to go away. It’s still not as fast as Alexa, but it’s fast enough. Unfortunately more recently it has picked up a new problem where it gets into a state where it fails to respond to about half of the commands (even within routines) - it just sits there for a full minute with the light on and then says “sorry, something went wrong” or “there as a glitch”. Rebooting the Sonos speakers and the router does not help - the only thing I’ve found that cures it is to reboot the whole network. Sonos wasn’t able to diagnose the problem.
I have the same issues with GA. When I first configured it it worked fine but now it is slow to respond and half of the time comes back with the comment “something went wrong….”
I did eventually find a workaround for when this problem occurs. I change my Sonos One running GA to a different LAN IP address. That immediately cures the problem. No idea why.
I’ve got a quick and convenient process now using the utility program dhspsrv on my computer, a DHCP server set to respond only to the MAC address of the Sonos GA speaker. It changes the Sonos GA speaker between two reserved LAN IP addresses without disturbing the rest of the network, issuing a non-expiring lease. The Sonos GA speaker is fine for a month or two, then the problem occurs again, and I flip it back to the other LAN IP address, which cures it again.
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