Google is announcing a second edition of its Nest Hub smart screen. The most flashy upgrade? Sleep tracking. The new Nest Hub will be available for preorder on March 16 and on shelves on March 30 for $100. It will come in four colors (chalk, charcoal, a bluey mist, and a reddish sand). Among the other updates will be a new machine-learning chip, so it can better remember your various gestures and favorite commands, and a third microphone, so it can hear you shouting across the room. And it will come with support for Thread, a protocol that will one day make Nest Hub interoperable with devices from Amazon, Apple, and other smart-home players. But today’s announcement is really about sleep. The Nest Hub launched in 2018 as the Google Home Hub and was rebranded the following year . It’s tried to stand apart from competitors such as Amazon’s Echo Show and Facebook’s Portal by being ultra-useful. Its most beloved feature is that it can conjure recipes (and really any tutorial) on demand. In concert with other smart-home gadgets from Google and others, it can do all the basic things you expect from a home hub, such as control lights and show you video from your surveillance system. But Google wanted to make it even more useful. In this update, the company added its Soli motion-tracking technology to the Nest Hub, giving it the ability to read gestures. (A creation of Google’s ATAP lab , the Soli technology debuted in 2019’s Pixel 4 phone .) Users will now be able to use gestures to halt an alarm or pause music. The technology is also the basis for the Hub’s new sleep feature. [Photo: courtesy of Google] The Nest Hub has previously introduced some features to help you go to sleep and wake up, such as white noise at bedtime and an alarm that gradually nudges you awake. Now the radar-based Soli technology can follow your movement as you slumber, allowing you to track your sleep. Google product manager Ashton Udall says the Soli technology can detect big body movements and is capable of “sub-millimeter detection of movements like your chest moving in and out while you’re breathing.” Nest Hub also tracks coughing and snoring, and is equipped with a temperature gauge and an ambient light meter, so it can see how your environment changes while you sleep. The company has taken care to ensure the Nest Hub tracks only you, even if you share your bed
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Google’s latest Nest Hub promises to help you sleep better