Many Google Home units are currently not working with the Philips Hue light bulbs, as numerous owners of Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) gadget recently took to the company’s official support forums to complain about a wide variety of issues, most of which are related to their inability to control the Philps-made smart lights with the speaker. All reports of connectivity issues are several days old at most, with the oldest one found on the Google Product Forums being dated July 20. Some users voicing their complaints have just purchased the Google Home or Philips Hue lights, whereas others have been using the two in conjunction for months without any issues, having only started experiencing problems in the last few days. This state of affairs indicates that the cause of the problem is a recent one and likely has something to do with the software controlling either the Google Home or Philips-made smart light bulbs.
The main issue affects the ability to control the Philips Hue lights by issuing voice commands to the Google Home’s Google Assistant, which many users are currently unable to do. The light bulbs themselves seemingly continue to work in a consistent manner and can still be controlled with the Hue Android app, some affected owners of the devices claim, with others noting that the problem only pertains to the action of turning the lights on and off; the Google Assistant is apparently still able to control their intensity when it receives a related voice command. One user claims that the problem may be related to the support for multiple Google Home accounts that the Alphabet-owned company started rolling out earlier this spring, though that assertion remains dubious seeing how the Philips Hue light bulbs were still fully compatible with the Google Assistant months after the Internet-enabled speaker was updated with multi-user support.
The Mountain View, California-based tech giant has already acknowledged the issue, with one of the company’s software engineers confirming that the Google Home product team is currently in the process of investigating the aforementioned reports but without providing a more specific time frame for the resolution of the newly discovered bug.