Google Home FAQ

Is TuneIn on Google Home being an absolute pain for anyone else yesterday and today. Starts streaming fine (even RTÉ!) but then just hangs - a lot! - after somewhere between 5 and 50 minutes. Tell it to play the station again, and it might just pick up again, or it might play the TuneIn ads first.

Hi all,

Relatively new to using Google Home but not new to IoT as in I have about 15 WiFi plugs controlling lights and fishtank etc, a Google Home, 5-6 Google Mini's and Chromecasts etc plus I have a Tado smart thermostat.

To date I've mainly set schedules for each device using the native app so lots of schedules on the Kasa app (some Teckin and Tapo also), the Tado app and only really used the Google Home app for the Google Home, Google Mini's and a couple of JBL smart speakers with Google Assistant built in but I recently decided to connect all of the devices to the Google Home app via the "Works With Google" linking option and thankfully everything I have linked fine.

I've now organised all the various devices into rooms and I like how Google Home allows me to have everything on one dashboard so to speak rather than having to use all the native apps to control devices.

My next challenge is to replicate all the various on / off schedules for lights etc using the "Routines" option in Google Home which I'm getting to grips with but I can't seem to find a way to add an "off" option to a routine e.g. I can set a routine to turn several lights on at sunset but I can't see an option to turn them all off at a particular time per day or after X hours of being on etc.

Am I missing something obvious? Do I need to set up a separate routine which just turns everything off?

Thanks, that's more or less what I ended up doing.

One thing I've noticed is that I regularly get notifications from Google Home that some device or other didn't turn either on or off when the respective routine ran. Never had this issue when the native apps were running on / off schedules. Is this something Google Home routines (which are a relatively new feature) struggle with currently?

What JBL smart speakers with Google Assistant built-in do you have and where did you get them? Thanks

I got their other branded Harmon karden speaker and great sound but would not buy again. The level of features is limited and they had no intention of enabling voice calling etc!!

Are they ever going integrate hue zones with google home?very annoying not being able to ask google to switch off an entire zone!!

The functionality of the hub is coming into question in my house these days. Cannot play RTE Radio 1 on two of hem; but RTE Radio 1 will play on any of the Google speakers and Alexa also plays it on a display

And like last year, it's back, 4 weeks later. 🙂

Yep. Gone for me too

Same

None of my can respond to "what time is it"

All this stuff we hear about AI over the last few months and they can't make a device that can play a radio station consistently or tell the time 😁 Although I'm guessing the RTE radio issues are to do with RTE. I bought a Home Hub for my Mam. Got fed up with trying to troubleshoot RTE (I get blamed as I introduced the device to her house) and bought her an old radio that works 100% of the time.

The potential for Google Home and Alexa is great but there's been no functionality added over the last couple of years that I'm aware of. All I seem to use mine for is to set an alarm or turn off lights (and they lose connection to random lights occasionally too).

We have google home devices dotted around the house, and they work well for the most part. I love how we can play music on a combination of the speakers, depending on the need. We had a bit of a party on Friday, and I found that the speakers weren't quite loud enough. I put my google home audio and original google home in the same room, both on full blast, which kindof did the trick, but I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with any other beefier speakers? I don't want to lose any of the google assistant features, so I'm a bit wary of moving to a third party speaker.

@RonnieL Have a look at this comment above

Thanks for the reply. I hadn't seen that speaker before. I don't mind the lack of calling, since I don't use that feature anyway, but perhaps getting a couple of nest audios is the way to go from a value perspective. I'd just have 1 in the room most of the time, and then if it's a party, I can plug in the second. Thanks again.

Yeah they discontinued the google max speaker, which seems odd to me - but I'm sure there's a reason. Interesting also that Sonos just released new speakers and have moved away from google integration.

It’s back! As of this evening I’m able to get RTÉ Radio 1 & LyricFM on my Google Nest. I haven’t tried my Google Home yet.

For future reference the email address I used to contact RTÉ was : Info@rte.ie

A load of responses, too, from people with the same problem - wasn't working on Alexa either, apparently. Fixed now, so yay. My own Hub is next to my desktop at home, so rather than hunt the radio I'd left out in the shed, I downloaded the tune-in app to the PC for emergencies.

If it's available as a podcast, you can "cast" it to a google speaker.

For example, I've streamed some Brendan O'Connor content and Playback on demand on my Google speakers.

We play Playback on Saturday morning from a podcast instead of live radio because it doesn't have any ads (Playback is released as a podcast the day before it airs on the radio)

My google devices are talking to me in a US accent now when we ask them to set an alarm.

For all other queries / tasks it answers in the normal more British accent that we have it set to . I checked the settings in Google Home and it's set to the accent we had it normally set to.

Anybody else have this or now how to fixt it. It's a first world problem but it's a bit annoying.

I had it change to an indian female accent randomly a few times, was hilarious, never figured out why, hasn't done it in a while

Same here