Try Again Later…
My Google Home alternates between “there was a glitch” and “try again later”. The telltale sign that something is wrong is that end-of-speech detection doesn’t kick in and the lights stay on until the error is eventually sounded through the device.
I’ve tried unplugging. I’ve tried removing from my Google Home setup and then reinstalling from scratch. I’ve tried factory reset. It did come back online after one re-setup attempt, but a few hours later, it was offline again, glitching. Googling to try to find a solution doesn’t yield an answer before I get distracted or called away by a little one.
Because of the emotional history I have with the device or that I come from a tradition of leaving people on life support, I keep trying to get it running and even leave it plugged it hoping one day it will wake up from its coma. It’s probably not going to happen unless I invest a good few hours finding out how. I still call to it and believe it will respond differently.
This scenario is likely shared by millions of other households. Maybe it’s my ego, but I imagine many people wouldn’t have the same patience that I have to try over and over again to resolve this. So, the device gets abandoned and then discarded. Daily Active Users goes down, and eventually, the service also gets abandoned.
We’re into the second decade of the Internet of Things but are still catching up with the user experience. Other device services send notifications when the device goes offline or starts to act strangely. It’s not a huge lift to implement this.
There’s still much value to IoT devices. Let’s home the next generation think about the long term experience.
