You told us: You're big fans of multiple Nest speaker groups

Google Nest device owners have long had the ability to organize their speakers and smart displays into multiple speaker groups. Unfortunately, Google recently removed the ability to add a Nest device to multiple groups as a result of a legal decision (presumably involving Sonos).

That got us wondering whether you used speaker groups in the first place. We posed this question as a poll in our news article last week and here’s what you told us.

Do you use speaker groups on your Nest devices?

Results

This was a popular poll, as almost 5,500 votes were tallied as of writing. It turns out that 60.9% of respondents have several groups for their Nest speakers. We’re sure that the article attracted plenty of people who use multiple speaker groups and who were alarmed by Google’s changes. Nevertheless, it’s still interesting to see how many people use several speaker groups as part of their smart home setup.

Otherwise, 17.1% of respondents use one Nest speaker group, while 16.4% of surveyed readers said they simply didn’t use speaker groups. We’re guessing that both of these camps only have a few Nest devices in their household, reducing the need for multiple speaker groups in the first place.

Finally, 5.5% of polled readers said they didn’t have a Nest device in the first place. Presumably these respondents either don’t have smart speakers or displays or use products from other manufacturers.

Comments

• Loki: Speaker groups haven’t worked properly for me for more than a year now. I gave up on them.
• roaduardo: Difficult to invest in Google products because you expect issues like this to always come up. Either they’re in some legal trouble or they just give up on a project and abandon it.
• markinapub: I guess you could get round this by just using the Home app to add the speakers you want to be playing once you’ve started the music. But it seems a rather petty legal decision.
• Wolfie: Think my speakers are older so no issue I guess but kinda annoying. I have every room as a group and then I have every single speaker in a group called “home” in case I want everything to play
• Tizio: I detest Sonos so much. I left them before Google home was a thing because they hadn’t innovated in years. Then instead of doing anything worthwhile to make their own products relevant again, they spend all their time making everyone else worse.