Google just changed how White Noise plays on smart speakers and now it’s less useful

Something strange is going on in the silent hours of the night as Google’s Nest speaker “white noise” feature has all of a sudden completely changed how it operates. According to many smart homeowners on the Nest Community forum, when saying “Hey Google, play white noise”, they’re now met with audio that’s much more muffled and shorter in span than it previously was.

Previously, the track that would fill the room would be much longer but is now only about 10 to 30 minutes long before it awkwardly loops. Additionally, it loops after a bit of silence, causing several users’ toddlers to wake from the jarring transition as they attempt to drift off to sleep.

The original poster on the forum believes that the company is utilizing a different audio file now for some unknown reason. One commenter states that it now sounds like a muffled airplane engine noise, with several others digitally nodding in agreement regarding the muffled audio.

The new white noise is also much quieter too, causing most people to have to place the default speaker audio higher than 70% while their children sleep, but the issue is then how loud the Assistant speaks when they ask it to dim lights or change other home settings. The result is a lot of manual phone toggles in place of voice commands, which just plain sucks.

This issue is also plaguing Nest Hub devices and other Assistant-enabled smart speakers. Over the past few days, several Redditors have also taken notice of the bug or intentional change. If this was, in fact, intentional on Google’s part, it’s clear that it was a bad decision, and that it ought to be returned to its default state.

You can mess with a lot when it comes to smart home software, but when you begin to tinker too much with core experiences or even niche features that users have come to love and rely on, it understandably makes them upset. I’m of the opinion that the company should implement a changelog or inform users ahead of changes like this to make sure they make sense beyond the whiteboard. At the time of writing this, there is still no response from Google on the matter, but we’ll keep this up to date if that changes.

In the meantime, you can simply ask Google to play relaxing sounds from Youtube Music. Try saying “Hey Google, play rain sounds”, “Hey Google, play ocean sounds”, or any other variation of relaxing audio. These commands do not trigger “white noise” files from the cloud, and if you want something longer, you can even ask Assistant to play 10-hour thunderstorm sounds!