Google Issues Sudden Feature Deletion Warning To All Nest Hub Users

The Nest Hub Max, the large sized smart display, speaker and virtual assistant by Google, being ... [+] exhibited on the Android Smart Home display during the Mobile World Congress 2023 on March 2, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images) If you picked up a Nest hub, or Nest Audio, in G oogle’s unexpected January sale , make the most of it now because the company is planning to delete some features very soon.

Google announced on its product support forums that Assistant, the AI that powers some of its Nest devices, will lose 17 features on January 26th. The company’s reasoning is that these skills are under used and that it wants to prioritize the most popular actions. The features heading to Google’s bulging graveyard includes controlling audio books with your voice, accessing your cookbook and setting radio alarms.

Seemingly popular features, like using your voice for broadcasting messages to other speakers in your family group, are going too. These features will disappear from mobile, smart displays and smart speakers—essentially anywhere Assistant can be used. However, some features will only be removed on certain devices.

For example, viewing sleep summaries (a key feature of the second generation Nest Hub) will only be available on smart displays. For audio only products, Google says that users can ask for “sleep details” by voice on third party smart clocks. You can read the full list of features on death row here .

Here are some of the features that Google is planning to kill off. Google says that it is “prioritizing the experiences you love and investing in the underlying technology to make them even better.” The “underlying technology” is the key part of that sentence because it is likely referencing the company’s vastly more intelligent AI: Bard.

Some unreleased features show how Google is integrating its new chatbot into Assistant, with the new service claiming that it’s “learning some classic Assistant features.” Assistant is very much a product of its time. Like other services from Amazon and Apple, Google's phase one AI has a clear set of defined skills that work well if it is prompted correctly.

But after years of using it daily, the results are often mixed. The step by step cooking instructions on a Nest Hub, for example, have never been a smooth experience for me. Similarly, negotiating with Assistant to do certain actions via voice control was often painful. Google has all of this data and has likely seen how few times people venture out of tasking Assistant with something basic, such setting a timer or a reminder.

Assistant in its current form was always going to be the first AI to lose its job to AI. Or, at least, be merged with its smarter successor. Its tightly defined abilities are in stark contrast to Bard, which has a lot more dexterity when it comes to understanding, answering and acting on user requests.

A Bard powered Assistant might be the AI helper we imagined Assistant to be when we were peppering it with silly questions all of those years ago..