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[Heartychoke]

SHORT VERSION
I factory reset one of my two Insignia Ns-cspgasp smart speakers. Before the reset both supported Digital Wellbeing features via Settings in the Google Home app. Afterwards, the reset service no longer has those options, when though they're the same model on the same firmware version. Any idea what's up?

BACKSTORY
I have two of these devices, one in each children's bedroom. My older daughter left for college, I didn't remove her profile from the one in her room before she left. So, I factory reset the device so that her account info would be removed. after the factory reset, I was disappointed to see that I was unable to set digital well-being settings for bedtime and content filters for my younger daughter. They were available before the reset on this device, and they are still available on the other device in the other bedroom.

trying to figure out what might be different, I went to the settings of both the devices in the Google Home app oh, and found that they both are on the same firmware for both device and casting:

System firmware version: 318
Cast firmware version: 1.36.146299

Looking for other clues as to what might be different, I noticed that in the home page of the Home app, there were some small differences in the icons representing these two devices. Both of the icons showed a speaker (as opposed to the Google branded Google home and minis, whose icons look like those devices). But, the icon of the device that could still do digital well-being had four Google dots underneath the speaker cone (the icon for Google Assistant, I believe), well the device with no digital well-being had no dots and the speaker cone was blue, similar to the icon for speaker groups.

My hypothesis is that the Google home is seeing these as two different types of devices, and therefore offering different sets of settings. I reached out to Google support to try to understand what the different icons might be signaling. They were unable to answer my question, and just said that the speaker with the blue speaker cone icon meant a speaker group.

Does anyone know what these different icons mean? Any ideas why my recently reset insignia smart speaker doesn't show all the same settings options as the one that I set up earlier? Any idea what I can do to make Digital Wellbeing available on the reset device?

[Mariah-BBY Retired: Social Media Specialist]

Greetings, Heartychoke,

Welcome to our community! A smart enabled speaker can certainly be a game changer to help with bedtime and certain routines. We appreciate the time you’ve taken out of your day to share that one of your Insignia Smart Speakers is having some issues after you reset it. We’d be happy to point in you the correct direction on this matter.

We’d highly recommend giving our support teams at (877) 467-4289 a call to see what advice may be available on this matter. Our teams noted above would be best positioned to advise and troubleshoot the issues you've described. Alternatively, reaching out to Google may be fruitful, as well, and sometimes they may be able to provide some additional context or advice, too.

Respectfully,

[Heartychoke]

Thanks! Will give them a call on Monday.

[Heartychoke]

Short version

I was able to connect with the Insignia team, who connected me to YouTube!, who connected me to Google Home. While I don't have a conclusive answer after an hour and 15 minutes on the phone, it appears that the Google Home app has changed such that it doesn't recognize the Insignia smart speakers as Google Home deviices and, therefore, eligible for Digital Wellbeing. I had them submit a feature request to the Google Home product team to support third-party smart speakers. Until that happens, “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“.

Additional context

After I was finally routed to the right tech support rep (for Google, BTW, not Best Buy/Insignia), we did some troubleshooting and quickly identified that the Google Home app supports setup and management of Digital Wellbeing controls on the three Google branded speakers on my network just fine. It just doesn't for my two Insignia speakers. This is a shame, because until very recently, it did.

Apparently Digital Wellbeing is also only supported in certain markets (i.e. the US). Editorial: it's super common for Google to test new features with small pilot groups before rolling them out to the general population. This helps them test features, but also can be due to navigating different local laws/regulations/customs. My guess is they're still experimenting with the code. It's possible they didn't intend to turn off third-party devices, but it's also possible they did to simplify integration testing. It's easier to ensure your code works on your own hardware.

I'm quite bummed contentand bedtime controls aren't available for the two devices in my children's rooms - that's where I most want them. I'm hopeful that functionality will come back soon.