Google’s Wear OS is often called neglected and, honestly, it’s a fitting description when you hear stories like this. In the past few months, the “Hey Google” hotword on Wear OS has been broken.
Reports on Reddit and Google Issue Tracker show that the keywords “OK Google” and “Hey Google” to trigger the Assistant are not working on Wear OS smartwatches. The problem apparently first appeared around November 2020 and has gone unnoticed since then, with the exception of the occasional Reddit topic. The staff of Droid-Life found reports dating back to June, which is well worth an “yuck”.
The Assistant is one of the main selling points of Wear OS smartwatches, as the only other wearables that are officially compatible with Google Assistant come from Fitbit, now owned by Google.
Fortunately, this issue does not affect the ability to actually use the Google Assistant on Wear OS, but it does make it a little more difficult to access. Without hotword support, you will need to hold down the watch’s power button to immediately launch the Assistant or use the touchscreen to trigger it from the left-most feed.
At this point, Google has not publicly acknowledged the problem or promised to fix it.
In fact, it does anything but instill confidence in Google’s support for Wear OS, and the fact that it took so long for someone to really notice it only makes things worse. The company said the purchase of Fitbit was partly to boost Wear OS as a platform, but neglecting a relatively central feature of its operating system for most of the year … is not a good sign. At least Google Assistant works very well on Fitbit.
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