[Update: Fixed] Google Assistant currently can’t connect to Philips Hue lights

Ben Schoon | Jul 20 2019 - 7:40 am PT

Smart speakers are used in many households for controlling smart lighting products. Currently, one of the most popular smart lighting options, Philips Hue, can’t be connected to Google Assistant due to a bug, but thankfully, both companies are at least aware of the problem that takes away the ability for Google Home to control the smart lights.

For the past several months, Google Home owners have been encountering spotty issues between Assitant and Philips Hue products. In recent weeks especially, this problem has only gotten worse, and currently, the two products can’t talk to each other whatsoever. For most users, this results in attempting to unlink and relink a Hue account to Assistant, but that only results in an error when trying to relink the two accounts.

Update 7/20: As of earlier this week, Philips Hue has confirmed on Twitter that a fix is available for this issue. In my own testing, the fix worked with Hue lights linking to Assistant effortlessly. Your results may vary as the fix is rolling out, though.

Hi Tina, the issue has been resolved and it seems to be working again for most of our users. Can you log into your Hue in the Browser and check if you see Google under apps?

— Philips Hue (@tweethue) July 18, 2019

Personally, I recently had this issue occur with none of my lighting-related commands or routines working. Earlier this week, I attempted to relink my Hue account, but was met with an error that didn’t allow the account to be linked or the lights to show in the Google Home app. For obvious reasons, this can be incredibly frustrating.

Thankfully, both companies have confirmed that they are aware of the problem. In a Twitter thread, both Google and Philips Hue confirm that they are aware of the outage, with both also confirming that work is underway on a fix. The problem appears to be on Philips’ end of matters, so this shouldn’t affect other products connecting to Assistant.

In the meantime, your Philips Hue products might not be working with a Google Home or Google Assistant on other devices, although it’s unclear if it affects all users of these products. From what we can tell, it only affects those who are trying to link their accounts, but isn’t affecting all users who are already linked up. Your results may vary.

Hopefully, this is an issue that gets patched soon. We previously reached out to Google regarding this matter, and we’ll keep an eye on the situation going forward.

Hey there, we saw your tweet. We're already aware of this and Philips Hue is currently working on a fix. We'd suggest reaching out @tweethue for additional help.

— Google Nest (@googlenest) July 13, 2019