Activating the Google Assistant by saying “Hi Google” has been broken for months, according to a 9to5Google report. Google account The Verge it is now working on a fix, saying it is “aware of the problems that some users have encountered” and will help its partners “solve them and improve the overall experience”.
There are a good number of users reporting the problem – a post on Google’s Issue Tracker has almost a thousand stars. Reading the topic, it is clear that many users with different smartwatch models have been reporting the same problem since November 2020. They say that the assistant is not completely unusable, as users can still trigger it by long pressing the button, but if the voice activation feature hasn’t been working for a long time, it probably doesn’t help the perception that Google doesn’t care about Wear OS.
Google’s statement doesn’t make it clear how long it will take for the problem to be fixed, but I hope it’s getting attention now. While Wear OS may not be central to Google’s strategy, the Assistant appears to be, and it would be nice if people who chose to put the Google operating system on their wrists had easy access to it.