Jimmy Westenberg / Android Authority
TL;DR
- A Nest Hub (2nd Gen) bug verbally confirms PM alarms as being set for the morning.
- The alarm itself still appears to be set correctly, so this seems to be a spoken confirmation glitch.
- Google says it’s aware of the issue, has identified a fix, and will share when it rolls out.
A smart display can get plenty of things wrong without ruining your day. Mishearing a song request or calling the weather wrong isn’t the end of the world, but if you ask it to set an alarm for something important later that afternoon, it’s not ideal if it leaves you wondering whether it has just scheduled your reminder for the cold, dark misery of 4 AM. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what one odd Google Nest Hub bug seems to be doing.
A Reddit user on the r/googlehome subreddit reports that their second-generation Nest Hub is verbally confirming some PM alarms as AM alarms. If they ask the Hub at 1 PM to set an alarm for 4, the device replies that the alarm is set for 4 AM. The same thing happens if they ask for an alarm “in three hours,” at 1 PM, with the Hub again informing them that their 4 AM alarm has been implemented.
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The more reassuring, but still weird, part is that the alarm itself still appears to be set correctly. According to the Redditor, the screen shows the correct PM alarm, and the device does actually set it for the right time. So this seems to be a spoken confirmation bug rather than a gremlin in the machine plotting to wake them up at an ungodly hour. Still, the verbal confirmation is there for reassurance, and telling you it has set your alarm for the wrong half of the day isn’t enormously reassuring.
At least for the Redditor, this appears to be a device-specific issue. They report that their Nest Mini v2 replies correctly with PM when given the same request, suggesting the bug may not affect all Nest devices in the same way. While we don’t have enough information from this thread, it could even be isolated to the second-gen Nest Hub.
There isn’t a flood of similar reports, but we can trust that the issue is real because Google has already acknowledged that something is wrong. Replying from the official GoogleNestCommunity account, the company said: “We’re aware of this issue and have identified a fix. We’ll circle back and let you know when it rolls out.”
There’s no timing yet for when that fix will arrive, and given the Nest Hub isn’t actually causing alarms to go off at all hours of the night, it might not be Google’s highest priority. In the meantime, if your Nest Hub confidently tells you it has set a PM alarm for AM, checking the screen might spare you a moment of panic that your smart display has forgotten how clocks work.
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