Google Home: What To Do When Google Assistant-Powered Speaker Becomes Unresponsive

If your Google Home device is not responding to your commands, then it’s probably due to a dirty mic. Tech junkie and web developer Robby Payne shared his experience this week and advised other users who may encounter the same problem to try this nifty trick in making the Google Assistant-powered speaker receptive again.

In Payne’s story, which he shared on Chrome Unboxed, his Google Home device stopped responding to his questions and commands one day. The lights atop the speaker would spin upon hearing his daughter’s questions, but the device would go out and not provide any response. Despite resetting the AI speaker, it still remained to be unresponsive.

Payne continued that he eventually tried doing a factory reset to ensure that his Google Home would reboot into its pristine behavior, but to no avail. He then surfed the web for answers thinking it could have been a software issue. Upon stumbling upon a thread about the same problem however, Payne was enlightened that the issue wasn’t due to problematic software at all.

The advice he got online was to blow in the microphone holes. Sounds a bit ridiculous, but his Google Home speaker has worked flawlessly since doing this trick. Payne is giving the same advice to users out there. He suggests that to confirm if the problem is indeed a dusty microphone, one should check the My Activity page for Google Home. The page stores all data that the speaker perceives. If the latest audio data from the page sounds broken, garbled or muffled, Payne says the same culprit could be responsible for the speaker's unresponsiveness.

Android Headlines says stories such as the one Payne shared online is not new at all. The typical cause of a Google Home device’s unresponsiveness is a dusty microphone slot. In instances wherein the blowing into the mic trick and factory reset — done by pressing the mic button for 15 seconds — fail, the tech site claims the problem is with the hardware. Damaged or defective hardware requires physical repair or a replacement.