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What you need to know
- Google Home Speaker users have noticed that the device has consumed an enormous amount of data in the background.
- The device was reportedly spotted consuming several terabytes of data in a single month without much use.
- Google is reportedly aware of the problem and has started rolling out a fix.
Users on social media are waking up to a startling truth: their Google Home Speaker has been incredibly active in the background. There’s no clear reason why, but the amount of data is staggering.
Posts on the Google Home subreddit draw attention to an unfathomable amount of data being consumed by the Home Speaker (via 9to5Google). The user states that they’ve “got one old Google Mini and three of the new Google speakers.” What’s more, these devices aren’t used for more than 20 minutes a day. This is strange, considering the user reports one of their Google Home Speakers consumed over 140GB of data in a day.
Combined, the user states their three speakers consumed 6TB of data “in under a month.” Another user with a Home Speaker reported the same, stating, “Something’s up with them. This just started in the past 2 weeks for mine.” This issue appears to be confined to the Google Home Speaker, as a user with a Nest Audio couldn’t find an unusual amount of data consumption.
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The publication speculated on this, too, but one Redditor said their speaker downloaded 20GB in a single day. However, they added that “It kept downloading firmware and failing to install it.” This makes it seem like the device got caught in the worst possible loop of downloading and failing.
Google reportedly informed the publication that this is an issue with the Home Speaker. It adds that “a fix is already rolling out” to address this problem. Android Central has reached out to Google for more information, and we will update this post when we hear back.
Hungry, hungry speaker
Google speakers like to gobble data
from r/googlehome
Android Central’s Take
I’d be concerned if I woke up one day and saw huge spikes of data being consumed by a Home Speaker. For what reason is it doing this, you know? It’s a concerning issue, especially for something always connected to the internet (hence the data consumption). What makes it worse is if you don’t use it that often, but maybe sparingly for queries here and there. The good thing is that Google is aware. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.
The Google Home Speaker is the company’s new beginning for AI in the home. Gemini is integrated throughout the product to assist users with daily queries and more. While the device has gotten off without a hitch (for the most part), the Home Speaker did struggle this summer. Users reported incredibly slow response times from Gemini.
A latency problem was the culprit. Users reported that on the first day, there were no issues; however, after the second, “…every single question (even ‘hello’) needs at least 30s of answer time.” Many queries that users would have for Gemini would time out, as the AI couldn’t respond within a meaningful time. What’s more, Google’s smart home devices beyond the Home Speaker struggled, too.
Google had to roll out a software update to solve this issue, which is strange. Shortly before these issues appeared, the company rolled out a Gemini update for its smart home devices to make it “snappier.” That seemingly backfired and required more tuning to get it right.