Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Assistant will be quiet with its responses to certain smart home commands.
- Google is working on instituting a universal chime in place of vocalized confirmations when you are in the same room.
- In other words, asking Google to turn off a device in the room you are in won’t involve hearing a vocal response about that action.
If you have a smart home powered by Google Assistant, you might be familiar with this situation. You ask Google to turn off the fan in the kitchen, and it responds with a lengthy statement: “Sure, turning off the fan in the kitchen.” However, with some other commands, Assistant will make a simple chime noise without vocalizing anything.
According to a recent announcement from the Google Assistant team, the chime will happen all the time soon, as long as you are in the same room as the request. The team has heard your complaints and is working to make Google Assistant quiet when responding to simple tasks.
“Based on invaluable input from the Google Nest community and feedback from our own internal trials, we’re expanding the use of chimes to acknowledge smart home commands to control devices in the same room,” Google Community Specialist “Lazarus” says in the post. “For those who’ve asked for fewer verbal responses, this one’s for you!”
If you use smart lights, you’ve already heard this chime. If you have a smart speaker located in your bedroom and you ask it to turn off the lights in the bedroom, it will just make a chime noise. Soon, this will happen for all smart home devices in the room, including outlets, switches, TVs, speakers, fans, etc.
Unfortunately, to get the Google Assistant quiet response, you’ll still need to issue a command within the same room. In other words, if you are speaking to a kitchen-based device and asking to turn off the lights in the bedroom, you will get the full vocal response: “Sure, turning off two lights in the bedroom.”
It’s not clear why Google isn’t just going with the chime for all simple “on/off” commands. It’s possible Google wants you to know what Assistant has done since you are not in the room to see or hear the action happen. Still, this is a step in the right direction to keep Assistant from talking your ear off.
