Verbal feedback when shutting lights via Google Assistant
So I'm a huge sonos fan, and recently upgraded to the Beam, which is my first sonos device with Google Assistant support.
One thing that google has improved is reducing how chatty the google nest mini is when you turn off lights. You can see them turn off, so having it tell you that it turn them off is a bit over the top.
I noticed the Beam does the old behavior of repeating back which lights are being turned off.
There’s a speech output setting on the page, however I’m not sure if it works on speakers.
I’ll tag this thread as a feature request, so our engineers can discuss this with Google.
If you have other concerns, feel free to reach out.
The speech output setting only works on smartphones and tablets.
It wouldn’t make sense on smart speakers anyway, since you wouldn’t even get a verbal response when asking for the weather or the time and since the info cannot be displayed anywhere there would be no point of having Google Assistant at all.
I couldn’t agree more with the OP, not having this feature is really annoying, especially since there’s no night mode on Sonos devices like there is on Google’s own and other third party speakers.
Really jarring when asking to turn off the lights when it’s late and people near you are asleep and having the Assistant blare out, “OK. TURNING OFF BEDROOM LIGHT.”
The chime would make not having night mode a bit more bearable at least, but that feature isn’t available either, which is a shame.
Hell, never mind the Assistant volume issue being discussed in this forum, you don’t even get a separate alarm volume when setting alarms using Google Assistant!
My wife is killing me over the annoying feedback from the Sonos speaker. The google nest mini’s in the children’s bedroom don’t have this feedback and now my wife wants met to get rid of the Sonos system and is forcing me to buy google nest speakers…. :-( Will there be an update?
This is so desperately needed. I’m tired of hearing “Ok, turning off 3 lights” every time I ask the Assistant to turn off the den lights. So unnecessary, and obviously Google has fixed this in their own hardware...
There is a workaround for this, which takes a bit of effort depending on how much you have that you want to control via GA and what you want it to do, but seems to work…
Go to the Google “Home” app on your phone and create a new routine, select “+ Add Starter”
Choose Voice Command as your “starter” (trigger)
Enter the phrase that you will say for the command you want GA to perform
(and you can add additional phrases/commands to cover the different ways you may want to say something).
Select “Done”
Now select “+ Add Action”
Then choose the action that you want completed.
Again you can have this complete multiple Actions if you need to.
Once you’ve added the action or all the actions you need, select “Done”.
Select “Save” to save your new routine.
Now when you say “Hey Google...” + the words you entered in the “starter” GA will perform the actions that you set for that routine and it does not give you any audible feedback as to what it is doing/has done…
Should you really want to, you can add verbal feedback as an action in the routine and specify exactly what you want GA say, but you don’t have to and if you don’t do that GA just performs the action with no response.
This way the most you get from Google is the beep (if you have that turned on).
Hope that helps….
This doesn’t work consistently. I was able to get it to work for “Turn on lights.” and “Turn on all lights.” but for some reason, my “Turn off lights” Routine gets superseded by the standard command interpretation with “Sure. Turning off 7 lights. I’m sorry, but 5 lights aren’t available right now.” So annoying.
This doesn’t work consistently. I was able to get it to work for “Turn on lights.” and “Turn on all lights.” but for some reason, my “Turn off lights” Routine gets superseded by the standard command interpretation with “Sure. Turning off 7 lights. I’m sorry, but 5 lights aren’t available right now.” So annoying.
Try creating a routine to turn off your lights with the voice command “Turn off my lights”… It may be the default commands take precedence so you might have to use a more unique phrase to get the routine to operate instead…
This workaround would be good, but I don’t even have the option to start a routine on my Sonos One GA! My GA home app only provides an option to start routines via my Nest devices.
I did notice that for a little bit the GA on the Sonos one chimed and now it’s back to “OK TURNING ON THE LIGHTS” which of course is announced freaking loud, because I didn’t buy a Sonos one to listen to music in low volume.
In either case, the more I use the GA on the Sonos, the more I regret buying it. Love the speaker for sound but the GA interface is just terrible and frustrating
