Google Nest Hub (2021) Review: Sleep Sensing isn’t a dream just yet

We’ve become fiends for tracking our own data. Smart watches push us to analyse our daily activities, but the newest iteration of the Google Nest Hub wants to track our night time movements.

Sleep Sensing is the latest, and most interesting addition to the Google Nest Hub (2nd gen). Of course sleep tracking isn’t anything new - Fitbits and other fitness trackers have been checking in on our sleeping habits for quite some time now. However what makes this so novel is that the Hub does this without needing to touch you.

It’s a pretty cool concept, but it does make for relatively superficial data. You’ll get information about your sleep duration, quality of sleep, and how well you kept to your sleep schedule. Each pillar is represented as one circle in a venn diagram, the better you do on each of these metrics the closer these circles will overlap. You’re ultimately aiming for a perfect circle. The Vitruvian Man of sleep.

Sleep duration is self explanatory, but sleep schedule is a self-imposed bedtime and wake up time which the Hub has the audacity to hold you accountable to. Every morning when I look at my data I am shamed for going to sleep and waking up late. Disappointing your robot butler isn’t a fun way to start the day.

Quality however is where the Hub starts to work its magic. Your sleep quality is determined by what night time disturbances you were faced with, these could be snoring, coughing, or times you left bed. The Hub will give you a summary of your breaths per minute, minutes of snoring, and coughing instances. From this it figures out what your sleep quality was like.

Considering that all this tracking is done just through contactless Motion Sensing, it’s actually impressive that you can get this breadth of analysis. However, this very thing is what makes Sleep Sensing unreliable.

Motion Sensing only extends so far, but the microphone picks up details from outside this range. Nights that I was sleeping alone my data was drastically different from when I'd be sleeping with my partner. Alone, I'd have somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes of snoring, but with my partner in bed those numbers skyrocketed to between 60 and 140 minutes. Google would graciously let me know that I had a very disturbed sleep each of these evenings, and throw out my quality circle.

Similarly when I was sleeping on my own, there would be nights when the Hub thought I'd left the bed for a few hours. I hadn’t though; I'd just rolled to the other side and out of range. On occasion the Hub has even thought that my dog napping on my pillow was me and thrown some random sleep data my way. Nice to be able to show my pup the solid data about her snoring though.

When you set up Sleep Sensing you do get a screen saying that the data can be skewed if you’re not sleeping alone, but is a solitary screen that you view for five seconds the answer to these problems? No, I don’t think so.

Google’s suggestion if you share a bed is that you should get two Nest Hubs so that you can both track your sleep. To me, that doesn’t sound like a solution, it just sounds like marketing. Even so, a secondary Hub doesn’t solve the problems I encountered. You’re still going to be getting inaccurate data, but now you’ll have two lots of it to shift through instead of just the one.

Regardless of how cool the tech is, the Google Nest Hub just isn’t an ideal way to track your sleep. At least, not yet. This is the very first version of Sleep Sensing and as such it's unsurprising that it's got some kinks. Nontheless, if sleep tracking was your main consideration for buying the Nest Hub it is worth reconsidering.

Realistically if you were to use a Fitbit or an Apple Watch instead, you’d get the important data from the Hub alongside more in depth data about your sleep cycles, and it would almost certainly be more accurate.

Right now, Sleep Sensing is free to use but Google has indicated that at some point this will become a paid feature. Before they introduce money to the bedroom, I’d want to see some drastic improvements to how Sleep Sensing works. For now, it’s a fun add-on but it’s definitely not something worth paying a subscription fee for.

Of course though, the Google Nest Hub isn’t just a sleep tracker - it’s a smart home hub that is capable of far more than just telling you how much you snore. Ultimately this iteration isn’t too different from the first generation. It serves as a great base station for your smart home devices, and you don’t need an advanced degree in order to set it up and use it.

Smart home hubs were the driving force behind the adoption of using voice assistants for our day to day tasks. While the likes of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have been available across devices since before the HomePod, the Echo, and the first Google Home, having these dedicated devices drove the adoption of voice assistant’s at a consumer level. Apparently, there’s something a little bit more comforting about talking to a disembodied voice in your own home as opposed to out in public.

When you’re looking at a smart home device what you really need is:

1. A good microphone and a responsive interface

2. The ability to integrate additional apps

3. A simple user experience

The Google Home Hub ticks all of these boxes, and this one has a screen to use as well. While I personally don't use the screen that often - simply because I have at least three other screens powered up around me at any given point - I see the value in it.

Coming in at 7-inches, the LCD touchscreen is responsive to the touch and makes for a large enough space to view all that you need to. The colours are vibrant, and while you can stream Netflix and Disney+ on the device, it's not a nice or large enough display to warrant watching your favourite shows. 

With Motion Sensing you can activate the Hub's screen with just a movement of your hand. This makes it perfect for following along with recipes in the kitchen, or checking out the traffic on your way to work. Of course though, if you want to do these things the screen probably shouldn't be in your bedroom.

Comparatively speaking, the second generation Nest Home Hub is more responsive than the newest Amazon Echoes. Integrating apps is simple, and for the most part it is done for you. Where Amazon speakers for example require you to enable a skill in order to connect to non- Amazon applications (such as Spotify), Google doesn’t need this extra step.

To be fair, it has been the same across Google smart speakers for the longest time but the Google Home Hub is definitely a step up when it comes to responsiveness. It makes sense, if you need a microphone capable of picking up someone’s snoring then it can probably figure out if you’re trying to ask it a question.

Setting up smart home devices is also a lot easier. Through the Google Home App, it will automatically give you prompts based on the devices that Google can pair with. For example I have a LIFX bulb in my lamp, within the app I got a suggestion to pair it, and low and behold it was done within seconds. I didn’t even need to open up the LIFX companion app. This was not a luxury afforded by Amazon earlier this year.

Google Nest Hub - Final thoughts

As a smart home hub the Google Nest Hub is an excellent choice. It delivers on all the essentials and it does so with the gracious ease of a figure skater. You just know that it’s hard, but man do they make it look easy.

The downfall however is the Sleep Sensing. You shouldn’t buy the Nest Hub as a sleep tracker, the technology simply isn’t there yet to warrant using this feature as your deciding factor. Sure it has it's uses right now; proving that you're right about your partner's snoring, keeping you accountable for your bedtime, letting you know the time that you actually fell asleep - but it's not going to outdo the fitness tracker already on your wrist.

Anula Wiwatowska

Offsite Editorial Lead | Instagram

Anula is the Off-Site Editorial Lead for WhistleOut Australia, and an award winning tech journalist. She has been writing about the Australian telco industry, and consumer technology for over five years, and has been known to tell her Uber driver which phone they should upgrade to next.

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