Google Home Update:
During the Q&A video, I mentioned that Google Home Integration would be ready by Q1 with a 99.9% chance. We are at the end of Q1 and the Google Home integration is not ready for production! I could call for 0.01% but that would not be fair. So here is an explanation of what is happening and what we are looking at with a new set of dates.
The initial development was completed at the end of January, just a week before we shot the Q&A video and we had, at the time, identified 3 issues. One was extremely damaging with the stream dying after 20s of streaming. The internal plan was to release the feature by the end of February but we had communicated the end of March to the community. This would give us about a month of contingency in case something went wrong.
The issue described ended up being extremely complicated to troubleshoot and involved four different companies on two different continents with all the difficulties associated with different native languages and time differences. We managed to identify that the audio portion was causing the issue and that removing it would allow us to gain the stability of the stream. The problem is that we used all of our contingencies to reach that point. The problem with the audio is still not fixed and we still don’t fully understand what is causing it. It is still a top priority not only for us but for Google.
So, what does it mean for the release?
We started the beta testing with more than 1,000 users, which is unprecedented and the results are very encouraging. We also initiated the request from Google for the release to production, which should give access to everybody and will not restrict the access to beta testers anymore.
We reached out to the community and asked if the initial release without sound was valuable enough or if we should wait until we have a fix for the sound. The result was unanimously to release without sound first. Here’s a link to that discussion from our Roadmap topic:
(Google Home/Assistant Integration - #338 by WyzeFrederik)
So the initial release will be without sound. Google told us that if no blocking problems arise during the validation that we should have a release within 2 weeks. This means a release around mid-April.