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[Fixed] Google Assistant cannot play radio stations right now

You’ve long been able to ask Google Assistant to play radio stations on all devices, but this integration is currently down amidst an outage. The company has not removed this capability.

Update 4/13: As of Thursday, Google says the “issue has been mitigated and all radio stations are back online.”


Original 4/12: “Hey Google, play Kiss FM” and other station requests are returning an “isn’t available or can’t be played right now” response on phones. Google Assistant’s radio integration is down across mobile, smart displays, speakers, and auto.

According to Google today, this is a global issue and impacts “most radio providers.” There are reports from people around the world having problems with local public radio stations, including the BBC, and SiriusXM (which you connect to in Assistant Settings). The error message Assistant returns should be slightly more descriptive to allay user complaints.

This issue appears to have started a few days ago.

The company is “actively working on restoring service.” Google’s full statement from this morning about the “radio disruption” is below:

Users globally have been facing issues when attempting to trigger radio stations on Assistant. The issue is being experienced across all surfaces (incl. Speakers, displays, mobile, and auto), and most radio providers. The Assistant team is actively working on restoring service. We will provide an update here as soon as the issue is fixed

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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com