A little bit of patience always helps
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 gained Google Assistant support nearly ten months after its initial release. Despite the delay, the rollout was not exactly smooth. Complaints started flowing in from users about the always-on hotword detection resulting in excessive battery drain, the wearable randomly disconnecting and unpairing from their phone, and more. Some users had to hard reset their smartwatch to get it to work again with their device. Now, if you have just gotten your hands on the Galaxy Watch 5 or Watch 5 Pro and are facing trouble setting up Google Assistant, worry not. You need to follow some peculiar instructions from Google to get the voice assistant to work.
Firstly, Google Assistant does not come pre-installed on the Galaxy Watch 5 series. So, after you have paired the watch with your phone and successfully set it up, head over to the Play Store to download and install Google Assistant on your Galaxy Watch. At this point, you may run into issues when setting up the digital assistant. Instead of trying again, Google wants you to wait for 15 minutes. This is what the big G says on its support page (via 9to5Google) on setting up Google Assistant on Wear OS watches:
If you own a Samsung Galaxy watch 5 series and have issues with setting up Google Assistant, before you reattempt setup, it’s best to wait for 15 minutes once your watch setup is complete.
While not mentioned, the 15 minutes will likely allow Google Play Store to update Play Services and other Assistant-related libraries in the background. Android phones and watches typically update core system libraries in the background during or after the initial setup process.
None of the Android Police team members have faced any issues while setting up Assistant on their watch, and we have not seen any reports about this on the internet yet. It could be too early to tell, though, as the first batch of Watch 5 pre-orders has just started making their way into customers’ hands. Nonetheless, if you do run into issues with Assistant on your new Galaxy smartwatch, you know now what to do.
