My wife has fixed the Google Assistant voice volume thing

  • 30 May 2022
  • 9 replies
  • 7479 views

I’ve seen tons of complaints on here about the Google Assistant voice being too loud. We had the opposite problem, it was too soft. 

I mentioned this to my wife yesterday and she sensibly said “just tell the Assistant what you want it to do”.

We have determined that this seems to work, addressing the Sonos:

“Hey Google, make your voice volume lower” 

“Hey Google, make your voice volume louder”.

On quick experimentation, the voice seems to have four or five volume level settings (it’s hard to discern this at the loudest end).  You can only go up or down by one level at a time. (At the loudest level, I tried “Set your voice volume level three levels lower” and it didn’t understand.)

I don’t know if this will also work to adjust volume for alarm tones. It does seem to work for the ‘acknowledgement tone’ that we have turned on.  This is all running on a Sonos Beam.

Hopefully not a fluke for us and works for others too. 

[Maybe this is not technically a question - How about we count the question as “Does this work for others too?”  I would have put it in as an answer on other threads asking the question, but they are all marked as “Answered” by someone from Sonos saying “We’re aware of the issue and there is no fix”.]

 


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9 replies

I use Alexa rather than GA so I cannot experiment. But my question would be: does this change just the volume if the voice responses, or the play volume also?

In my first-quick-test here, the voice command mentioned increases the volume of both the player and of course the assistant, which is intrinsically linked to the player-volume, as we know. So I’m thinking it’s probably not what people have been looking for.

In my own use-case however, I’m quite happy with how GA works on Sonos, as it’s volume is okay for how I like to listen to my Sonos speakers and the assistant.

@Cabe F . I think Ken's response confirms what I suspected. The reason you found the voice volume too low whereas many others found it too loud is that you have the speaker volume lower than the others. The fundamental problem is that voice response and play volumes cannot be controlled separately. 

One workaround with Alexa is to pick up a cheap, older generation Echo Dot to handle commands and turn off the mic on the Sonos speaker. I am not sure whether an equivalent approach can be used with GA.

It is really frustrating that Sonos doesn’t have a setting for the assistant volume. In my humble opinion it makes the assistant unusable and a pointless feature.

As @John B suspects, you can do this very thing with Google Assistant. I use a Nest Mini for this purpose.

I agree that GA on Sonos Ones is effectively useless. I think Sonos did the right thing by introducing their own assistant. Which, unfortunately...doesn’t work with my music service, YouTube Music. Gee, I wonder why. I’m betting it’s not Sonos’ fault...

I have the same issue. It make Google assistant on Sonos pretty worthless if you can't use it or here it just because the volume is a little lower. We did t used to have this problem, so not sure what changed. The voice volume was fine until a few months ago.

Same issue here, I used Sonos one and voice assist was too loud. I then switched to Arc and maybe it got even louder! In general I believe users prefers a constant voice volume (I.e. 40%) even if we listening to loud music or ground shaking movie. Google speakers have a night mode setting for reduced voice volume in a defined time periods. Sonos should do better and let users set the voice loudness independently of the other media volume.  Does not feel like rocket science and many has requested this feature for years.

Hope they care about user experiences more than just releasing new products……

 

 

 

 

 

Considering the number of threads and Sonos products in deployment this is very disappointing. @Sonos this should be fixed as a priority 

This fix works as a general volume control. On my end it quiets Google assistant and totally muted all other "non deafening" sounds coming from my setup at the same time.

 

This issue is definitely unresolved and the deafening Google Assistant volume should be fixed as a priority. Google Assistant is unusable as it is.