The ability to use Nest Audio as a speaker, one of the key capabilities that was promised for the Chromecast with Google TV, has still not been released.
This week, Google revealed that the live video feed from its more recent Nest cameras may now be viewed on the TV using the Chromecast with Google TV starting in 2020, as well as possibly all Google TV, Android TV, and Cast-compatible devices. Twitter users were quick to notice a little resemblance to a previously rumoured feature for Android TV and Google TV, which will display Nest Doorbell warnings in picture-in-picture mode.
Some of the other features that Google had initially confirmed for the Chromecast with Google TV when it came in late 2020 were brought to mind by the announcement and the conversation that followed. The most notorious of these, in my opinion, was a claim made in some unused Google advertising content that the new Chromecast could transform your Nest Audio speaker(s) into a home theater sound system.
The company told Wall Street Journal that it was working on a solution to link one or more Nest Audio speakers to the Chromecast with Google TV despite the feature being unutilized and only momentarily displaying in the Google Search result. It’s not hard to see the speaker being equally well-suited to watching movies and playing video games. In our evaluation of the Nest Audio, we lauded the speaker’s well-rounded sound profile that lent itself well to music.
But despite being less than two months away from the Chromecast with Google TV’s two-year anniversary of introduction, there has been no progress in linking the dongle to any of the Nest speaker models. The closest thing we have is an awkward workaround , which entails combining your Nest speakers and Chromecast by creating a speaker group in the Google Home app.
Some Cast-compatible video streaming apps will display that speaker group as an available target by employing that method. Of course, the solution’s inability to support native Android TV apps is a drawback. This workaround has also become less practical as a result of recent changes to Google Homes speaker groups. Customers who have both Nest Audio and the Chromecast with Google TV have been eagerly awaiting Google’s official solution as a result.
At this point, though, with only a hazy assurance that they were once working on it, it might be time to give up on Nest Audio ever being formally approved as a speaker for a Chromecast.
But if so, it would be a glaring disadvantage for Google’s Nest ecosystem in comparison to those offered by Apple and Amazon. Today, you may quickly connect one or two Apple HomePod Mini speakers to an Apple TV and an Echo speakers or Fire TV device from Amazon.
In some respects, this serves as yet another reminder to never base your decision to purchase a product on what it might be able to achieve in the future. As they never formally announced or marketed the possible feature, Google isn’t entirely to blame in this case, but that doesn’t make the situation any less frustrating.
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