Google Home is experiencing a unique bug that announces Nest Doorbell notifications in an American accent, even if your preferences are set to literally any other language/dialect.
According to one user on Reddit, Gemini has been responding to them in American accent only when its referencing their Nest Doorbell. That’s nothing out of the ordinary on the surface, but this user’s complaint revolves entirely around the fact that they’re French, speak French, and live in France. Even still, the Nest Doorbell seems to trigger Gemini’s US English.
It isn’t just affecting one user, or one device. A commenter expressed the same concern in the Netherlands, and another in the UK. For the user in the Netherlands, their Bosch washing machine alerts default to US English instead of Dutch. It sounds like every other interaction with Gemini happens in the language of choice, but certain appliances bring out a different Gemini voice altogether.
According to a response by an official Google account, the issue is being worked on. No fix has been rolled out, but Gemini will likely stop responding in its American accent soon enough, unless you specifically want that.
It might have been be a bug developed after the September Google Home update with changes to Gemini for Home. Spoken notifications seem to work as intended, but for whatever reason, Gemini chooses to give the user context in an American accent instead of the language or accent set in preferences. the only change note that refers to Gemini is one that improves follow up question behavior. Beyond that, there’s nothing pointing towards an obvious cause.
Something is clearly broken along the pipeline of information, but it’s manifesting in one of the most hilarious ways.
It’s a strange one, but Google is aware of the issue and claims to be working on it.
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