It’s been months since we’ve seen the complaints from Wear OS smartwatch users that Google Assistant isn’t fully working on their wearables. It looks like Google still hasn’t been able to fix the bug that makes the hotword detection not work when you call upon Google Assistant. While you can still manually and easily access the digital assistant on your smartwatch, it can still be annoying for those who wanted the convenience of calling on Google Assistant through a voice command. Google seems to be working on a fix although there has been no official word.
The problem is not really that you can’t access Google Assistant. It’s that you cannot say “Ok Google” or “Hey Google” to summon it and instead would have to manually navigate to activate the digital assistant. The problem first showed up around October and now four months later, there are still a lot of complaints that they are unable to use the hotword detection process. Some have said this is due to software updates while others have had the problem with their smartwatch out of the box.
According to Android Central, some users have also complained that some of the Google Assistant features do not work. They are unable to send a text message or to play music or to navigate. These are pretty basic but important smartwatch features and a lot of users have bought them for the ease of hands-free navigation with Google Assistant so it can be a pain to realize it doesn’t always work.
Google is well aware of the problem and they have currently marked the issue as “assigned” so that may mean they are working on some kind of fix. The fact that this problem has been on and off for months now and there has been no official word is not a good sign. The problem has been around before the last Wear OS major update so we don’t know if it’s really updating your wearable that causes the problem.
While Google Assistant has been working well with other parts of the Google ecosystem, Wear OS seems to have gotten the short end of the stick. Hopefully this gets fixed soon before people start losing faith (even more) in Google’s wearable platform.