This weekend, in a rare moment where the family was out of the house for an extended amount of time, I took the opportunity to really let my pair of Google Home Max speakers show off their audio skills. Volumes were cranked. Tunes were consumed. It was wonderful. Unfortunately, once done, I forgot to turn the volume dial back to a normal level.
When our schedule of family bells kicked off Monday morning, we were all greeted to a reminder for my son to read some books with volume at like 80%. That shit hurt the ears. It scared him. My sleeping cat was pissed.
As it was going off, before Google gave us Assistant’s simple new “Stop!” command, I scrambled to adjust volume, which was only made more difficult by the fact that the Google Home app is broken on my Pixel 5 running Android 12 Developer Preview 3.
You know what would be super helpful during situations like these? Separate volume controls for Google Assistant and media on Google’s smart Home and Hub and Mini devices. The idea was suggested (again) on reddit today and it’s one of those you read, nod feverishly in agreement at, and then immediately change to, “Yeah, Google, why the hell don’t we have this?” People have been talking about this for years, of course, even calling it a “critical” issue.
It seems like such an obvious ability that Google should have baked in right away. How many times have you played music, turned volume up, and then asked Google Assistant for something, only to be blown away if you left media volume untouched? I’d imagine this has happened to us all on too many occasions.
The thing is, Google already has separate controls for a number of other items. You can separately adjust volume for alarms and timers, lower audio from a TV or speaker when you ask Assistant for something, and adjust bass/treble. Google does volume controls, they just haven’t given us this one thing.
Google, let’s do it!
This post was last modified on May 12, 2021 10:56 am