[Update: Still not fixed] Google Home radio alarms not working for many, company aware

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on June 07, 2019) follows:

Google’s smart speaker Home devices were re-branded as Google Nest at the company’s this year’s annual developer conference. During the same event, it was announced that instead of having to say “Hey, Google, turn off the alarm,” one could simply ask their Home device or phone to “stop.”

As you may know, Google Home offers interesting ways to set alarms apart from the general alarms. With Media alarms, one can play their favorite music as an alarm or choose to wake up with an alarm voiced by a popular animated character. Even radio can be played as an alarm.

However, recently we’ve seen Google Home users reporting issues while setting up radio alarms. While some say radio alarms have suddenly stopped working on their Home units, others who bought new devices say they don’t work out of the box.

Going by reports, instead of radio alarm, Google Home ends up setting a general alarm. Take a look at how some complainants word this across the company’s official help forum.

Same here, since purchase my mini has a routine set to wake me by radio then last night it said this feature is not available!!………what’s going on?

I am unable to set a music alarm for about a week now. It keeps asking me what song I would like to play and when I tell it the song I want, it just asks me again as if it can’t hear me. After 2 times it says it can’t do anything for me and goes ahead and sets a normal alarm.

We just bought a home hub now that this functionality is advertised as being available in the UK. Set up the hub, tried to set a radio alarm and the damn thing says it’s not available on this device yet. Exceptionally frustrating.

While reporting the problem to Google Nest team on Twitter, one of the complainants even shared a small video clip of their Google Home Mini failing to set radio alarm.

As far as we can see, the problem isn’t region-specific, as users in North America, Australia and UK report of encountering it.

What’s good is that as soon as reports began to snowball, a forums product expert at Google Home help pitched in saying they were able to reproduce the glitch and have even reported it to Google Home team.

I have multiple Google Home and Google Nest devices myself and only just noticed that I couldn’t set a radio station media alarm within the last 24hrs (setting a media alarm that plays from Google Play Music still works) so I have flagged this for the attention of the Google Home team.

The same expert has been addressing all user queries across the forum regarding this issue with radio alarms lately, telling users it has been reported to the team. Apart from that, while reverting back to the same complainant on Twitter, here’s what Google Nest team said lately:

Here’s hoping the concerned team diagnoses what could be causing this as well as do the needful to fix things up at the soonest. Rest assured, like always, we are keeping an active tab on the matter and will update the story as and when any new development comes to out sight.

In the meantime, if you were also facing this glitch and have figured out a workaround to resolve it, feel free to share with others by dropping a comment below.

06:14 pm (IST): It’s been a couple of years but fresh developments indicate that the issue is yet to be fixed. In a recent response to a user’s complaint regarding the bug, Google support claimed that they are aware and a fix is still in the works.

It seems Google is having a hard time fixing something that should be relatively easy for the software giant.

NOTE: For more Google Home related bugs/issues, news and stories, interested readers may head here.

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