In our review of Google’s $99 Nest Audio speaker, we wrote that it’s “unfortunate that you can’t use two Nest Audio speakers paired with a Chromecast for home theater audio, like you can do with a couple of Amazon Echo speakers and a Fire TV.”
But it appears that Google originally intended to offer just such a feature — and we’re wondering if the company might still introduce it in the next few months.
As 9to5Google points out, Google seemingly forgot to remove a rather telling arrangement of words from the HTML source for its Nest Audio product page:
With Chromecast & Google TV Nest Audio becomes your home theater sound system.
The UK version of the page even had an alternate localization of the same sentence, which suggests intention.
With Chromecast and Google TV, Nest Audio becomes your home cinema sound system.
There’s not a whole lot of ways to interpret that phrase. Here are a few that spring to mind:
- Google was working on the exact thing we wanted, but decided to scrap the feature before launch and forgot to update one portion of its website.
- Google is now working on the exact thing we wanted, and has quietly inserted a hint into its website.
- Someone who was building the website drastically misinterpreted their instructions and made a funny mistake.
But even though it would have been easy to admit the mistake, that’s not the direction Google has chosen to take: the company tells The Verge it has “no news on this front,” which suggests that it’s likelier to be #1 or #2.
We’re not sure which, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if the feature arrived in a future software update. We already know the new Chromecast with Google TV is slated to get an update with Google Stadia cloud gaming support in the first half of 2021. Perhaps it’ll add some speaker pairing, too.
