Google Assistant currently plagued with multiple issues, including broken Ok Google

Update (September 07): Xiaomi’s Poco brand has confirmed that the ‘Ok Google’ issue their F1 phone should be fixed in the next OTA update.

Original story follows:

Multiple Google Assistant related issues are coming to light. Let’s take them up one by one.

Voice automatically changed to US English

Has the Assistant’s voice on your Pixel series phone or Google Home series speaker suddenly changed from your preferred non-US English to US English?

Well, you aren’t alone. A significant number of people from different countries have confirmed this unwanted change.

But what’s good is that Google quickly acknowledged it’s an issue, and is being looked into. Here’s what a Google employee said on the company’s official forum last week.

Thank you for sharing feedback regarding this issue, and I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The team is aware of this problem and currently investigating a stable solution. Please feel free to continue updating this thread with any additional information

Here are a couple of complainants explaining the problem:

Assistant voice changed to US english only. This also applies to my Google home mini and the assistant voice on my Pixel 2. Yesterday all assistant voices changed to US english, instead of Australian english as I had set up.

Nothing I do in the settings of any device returns the pleasant Australian assistant I prefer. It is however possible to change the localization to Japanese and talk to the thing in Japanese, but I don’t know Japanese. The point is that google seems to have intentionally erased the superior (non-US) English-language assistant voices.

I am in the same situation I live in the UK just got home from holiday and all my assistants are speaking American despite the language setting being set to English UK. I have tried changing to American and back to English again but nothing changes if I ask my location The Voice replies in English. But if I ask anything else it is an American female voice that respond.

It’s worth mentioning that this is not the first time Google Assistant is having accent issues. Let’s hope Google acts quickly to fix this problem this time around.

Ok Google voice match not working

Google Assistant’s Voice match feature not working isn’t a new problem – it has been reported since months. Google finally called the issue fixed last month – see our coverage here.

However, what’s now coming to light is that a large number of users are still seeing grayed out Voice Match settings.

If you take a look at the thread where a Google employee updated last month that the fix for this issue is being rolled out, you’ll see a lot of recently posted comments that say the problem persists.

It’s worth mentioning that users of the newly launched POCO F1 apparently form the majority here, as there are dedicated threads on Xiaomi forum as well as Google’s own forum where F1 users are discussing similar OK Google related issues.

For its part, Google hasn’t said anything officially on these platforms since the last update the company provided in August. Here’s hoping the company is working on the problem internally, and a fix would be outed soon.

Meanwhile, lets us know your experience in comments below.

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