Google fixes virtual assistant bug on smart speakers and Android phones

After several Google users across the globe encountered a bug while accessing Google Assistant, the internet giant has now reportedly fixed the issue. According to a report by 9to5Google, last week, a small subset of users were not able to access the voice assistant on their Android smartphones and other Google devices. In the case of the smart displays, the users had said that they were seeing Google Assistant’s four dots spinning endlessly. In Google Assistant-powered smart speaker, the users, on the other hand, reported the speaker saying “something went wrong” or “there’s a glitch”, which rendered all these devices unusable. 

The report said that while some users were able to get their voice transcribed, others weren’t. The issue had affected both first and third-party devices, like the Nest hub/Max, Google Home, JBL Link View and Insignia alarm clock. Users had complained that they were not able to move beyond the “Set up Google Assistant” screen as they get a “Problem connecting to cloud” error. 

Neither uninstalling the last update in case of the mobile app nor resetting the hardware in case of the smart speakers and the smart displays seemed to help. The report said that the issue with the Google Assistance had appeared to have arisen a few days after the big outage earlier this month.  However, now, the company has fixed the issue. While for some users the bug was fixed automatically, others reportedly received a call from Google Nest wherein they provided with a code to tag feedback in. 

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Google reveals root cause of outage 

Last week, Google had also revealed that they had identified the root cause of the outage and had said that the company is taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability. The outage had occurred because of a technical misstep stemming from an error in the User ID system due to the transfer of tools to a new storage system. The American tech giant has said that some of the tools that it was transferring to a new quota system were left in place which caused the outage. 

Google has apologised for the error to customers whose services or businesses were impacted during this incident. The firm said, “We take any incident that affects the availability and reliability of our customers extremely seriously, particularly incidents that span multiple regions. We are conducting a thorough investigation of the incident and will be making the changes which result from that investigation our top priority in Google Engineering”. 

(Image: AP)

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