Author Archives: Ashton Udall

Let Nest help you rest up for the holidays

We introduced the Nest Hub (2nd gen) earlier this year as a device that can help the millions of people looking for help with their sleep. Since then, we’ve been hard at work creating even more ways to help you get a better night's rest. Having better insights into your snoring, coughing or sleeping environment can help you make changes that improve your sleep. Its award-winning sleep technology is powered by Soli, our miniature radar sensor that helps you understand your sleeping habits - all from your bedside with no contact and no camera. 

Introducing sleep staging

Our improved algorithms mean you get even more details about your sleep. Your Nest Hub will share information about your light, deep, REM and awake periods throughout the night. The Duration and Quality screens will tell you how long you were in each stage of sleep. Combining your sleep information with disturbance events can help you better understand what’s happening while you’re sleeping.

Nest Hub showing the Sleep Sensing Duration experience

Sound detection updates

For those who share their sleeping space with others — partners or pets — now your display will only show coughs and snores that come from your calibrated sleeping area. Any coughing and snoring that happens outside of your area will appear on the new “Other sounds” timeline. This new timeline will also show other loud noises.

Get centered with meditations from Calm

Coming in December, the Google Assistant on Nest displays will give you access to Calm, a leading app for Sleep, Meditation, & Relaxation™ with a library of Sleep Stories, meditations, music and more. To try meditation content from Calm, you can either say, "Hey Google, show me meditations from Calm" or "Hey Google, start a meditation." If you have Calm Premium, you already have access to the full library. If you don’t, you can access several free tracks or sign up for an account that gives you access to Calm Premium.

Calm app experience on Nest Hub

Enjoy a preview of Sleep Sensing for free through 2022. In 2023, Google plans to integrate Sleep Sensing into Fitbit Premium (currently $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year, subject to change and may vary by country). Google and Fitbit continue to innovate within sleep and explore areas where integration with Fitbit and the Fitbit Premium subscription can provide even more helpful sleep and wellness benefits.

These new sleep features start rolling out today, and will be available to users globally over the next few weeks. These enhancements make Nest Hub the perfect gift for (or before) the holidays — what’s better than the gift of sleep?

Related Article

Need a better night’s sleep? Meet the new Nest Hub

Introducing the second-generation Nest Hub, with everything you loved about the original plus new features designed to help your sleep.

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Need a better night’s sleep? Meet the new Nest Hub

A little over two years ago, I was part of the team that created Nest Hub, Google’s first smart display. Since then, we’ve been exploring ways to make these devices even more helpful. We know people already come to Google for information and tools to help them live healthier, happier lives, and we’ve specifically noticed more and more questions about sleep, exercise and health. So we decided to bring these kinds of solutions to our second-generation Nest Hub, while also improving what people already love about it. 


The Nest Hub you love, but better

The new Nest Hub’s speaker is based on the same audio technology as Nest Audio and has 50 percent more bass than the original Hub. Fill any room with music, podcasts or audiobooks from services like YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora — or enjoy your favorite TV shows and movies with a subscription from providers like Netflix, Disney+ and YouTube TV. With Quick Gestures, you can pause or play content at any time by tapping the air in front of your display.

Animated gif showing someone using the Quick Gestures feature.

Nest Hub has all the smarts and helpfulness of Google Assistant. And similar to Nest Mini and Nest Audio, it now comes with a dedicated on-device machine learning chip which moves some Assistant experiences from our data centers directly onto the device, so responses to common commands become faster over time (U.S. only). 

The new Nest Hub also shows all your compatible connected devices in one place. And with a built-in Thread radio, Nest Hub will work with the new connectivity standard being created by the Project Connected Home over IP working group, making it even simpler to control your connected home. 


New sleep features for better rest

The Nest Hub has always helped you tackle the day; now, it can help you rest well at night. Many of us don’t get enough sleep, which comes with some real risks. 

As a father of two young kids, I’m especially passionate about sleep. I know I’m much more able to  show up and connect with my family and the people in my life after a healthy amount of rest. In recent years, sleep trackers have become a popular solution. But we wanted to offer an alternative way for people who may not want to wear something to bed to understand their sleep.

Image shows an infographic outlining various ailments caused by lack of sleep.

We knew people felt comfortable with Nest Hub at their bedsides thanks to its camera-free design, so we went to work. The result is Sleep Sensing, an opt-in feature to help you understand and improve your sleep:

Understand your sleep:Sleep Sensing uses Motion Sense (powered by Soli low-energy radar technology) to analyze how the person closest to the display is sleeping, based on their movement and breathing — all without a camera or wearable. Sleep Sensing can also detect sleep disturbances like coughing and snoring or the light and temperature changes in the room with Nest Hub’s built-in microphones and ambient light and temperature sensors, so you can better understand what’s impacting your sleep. 

Every morning you’ll receive a personalized sleep summary on your display, or you can view your sleep data anytime on the Nest Hub by asking, “Hey Google, how did I sleep?” Sleep Sensing can also connect to your Google Fit app on Android and iOS devices, so you can see your sleep summary alongside your other health and wellness information.

YouTube video about Sleep Sensing and Soli technology.
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Get help for better sleep: Understanding your sleep is an important first step, but you may still have questions about what you can do to get better sleep. Sleep Sensing provides tailored bedtime schedules and personalized suggestions developed by a team of sleep scientists and using guidance from organizations like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Compiled after several nights of analysis, these suggestions point out notable aspects of your sleep, educate you on why they’re important and provide suggestions to improve.

Built with your privacy in mind:Sleep Sensing is completely optional with privacy safeguards in place so you’re in control: You choose if you want to enable it and there's a visual indicator on the display to let you know when it’s on. Motion Sense only detects motion, not specific bodies or faces, and your coughing and snoring audio data is only processed on the device — it isn’t sent to Google servers. You have multiple controls to disable Sleep Sensing features, including a hardware switch that physically disables the microphone. You can review or delete your sleep data at any time, and consistent with our privacy commitments, it isn't used for personalized ads.

Sleep Sensing on the second-gen Nest Hub is available as a free preview until next year. We'll also be looking for ways to work with Fitbit's sleep-tracking features in the future. 

Even if you don’t enable Sleep Sensing, you can still fall asleep and wake up easier with Nest Hub. The display dims to make your bedroom more sleep-friendly, and the “Your evening” page helps you wind down at night with relaxing sounds. When it’s time to wake up, Nest Hub’s Sunrise Alarm gradually brightens the display and increases the alarm volume. If you need a few more ZZZs, use Motion Sense to wave your hand and snooze the alarm. 

Sustainable design that matches any room

The new Nest Hub comes in a variety of colors to complement any room in the house: Chalk, Charcoal, Sand and the new Mist. It features an edgeless glass display that’s easy to clean and functions as a beautiful digital photo frame. And continuing our commitment to sustainability, Nest Hub is designed with recycled materials with its plastic mechanical parts containing 54 percent recycled post-consumer plastic.

The second-generation Nest Hub is $99.99 USD. It can be preordered online in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France and Australia at the Google Store and other retailers starting today.

How ultrasound sensing makes Nest displays more accessible

Last year, I gave my 74-year-old father a Nest Hub for Christmas. Over the following months, I noticed he would often walk up to the device to read the information on the screen, because he couldn’t see it easily from across the room. I wondered if other people were having the same issue. 

My team at Google Nest and I started having conversations with older adults in our lives who use our products, asking them questions about ways they use their devices and observing how they interact with them. In the course of our research, we learned that one in three people over the age of 65 have a vision-reducing eye disease, and that’s on top of the millions of people of all ages who also deal with some form of vision impairment. 

We wanted to create a better experience for people who have low vision. So we set out to create a way for more people to easily see our display from any distance in a room, without compromising the useful information the display could show when nearby. The result is a feature we call ultrasound sensing. 

We needed to find a sensing technology that could detect whether you were close to a device or far away from it and show you the right things based on that distance, while protecting people’s privacy. Our engineers landed on one that was completely new to Google Assistant products, but has been used in the animal kingdom for eons: echolocation. 

Animals with low vision—like bats and dolphins—use echolocation to understand and navigate their environments. Bats emit ultrasonic “chirps” and listen to how those chirps bounce off of objects in their environments and travel back to them. In the same way, Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max emit inaudible sound waves to gauge your proximity to the device. If you’re close, the screen will show you more details and touch controls, and when you’re further away, the screen changes to show only the most important information in larger text. Ultrasound sensing allows our smart displays to react to a user’s distance. 

Directions on a Nest Hub

Ultrasound sensing allows your display to show the most important information when you’re far away, like your total commute time, and show more detail as you get close to the device.

To develop the right screen designs, the team tested varying text heights, contrast levels and information density and measured the ease with which people could read what’s on the screen. It was refreshing when, regardless of age or visual impairment, testers would make comments like, “it just feels easier to read.” It turned out that designing for people with low vision improved the experience for everyone.

Ultrasound testint

Testing ultrasound sensing during the design process.

Ultrasound waves

What ultrasound sensing “sees” on a smart display.

Ultrasound sensing already works for timers, commute times and weather. And over the coming week, your devices will also begin to show reminders, appointments and alerts when you approach the display. Because this is using a low-resolution sensing technology, ultrasound sensing happens entirely on the device and is only able to detect large-scale motion (like a person moving), without being able to identify who the person is.

After we built the ultrasound sensing feature, I tested it with my dad. As soon as I saw him reading his cooking timer on the screen from across the kitchen, I knew we’d made something that would make our devices even more helpful to more people.