Google assistant not playing personalised playlists

[danz207]

Plan

Premium

Country

Australia

Device

Nest hub, home mini

My Question or Issue

Ever since Spotify wrapped 2021 came out, my nest devices no longer play my personalised playlists via voice commands. I can see the command come up on my next hub (eg hey Google Play my playlist top songs 2017), but it simply ignores it and plays something that sounds similar. People are reporting this issue on the Google community forums too.

[fritzseidel]

I have the same with some playlists in my automated routines. One day it
finds out, one day it doesn't...

[Yordan]

Hi @fritzseidel!

Could you let us know the following, so we can forward the info to the teams investigating this:

• Affected device + OS version.
• Name and link of the playlist you wanted to play.
• Name and link of the playlist that the Voice assistant played instead.
• A video where we can see the issue (if possible).

Also, did un-linking and re-linking Spotify like @Viewfan suggested do the trick for you?

Thanks!

[imacattack]

Same!!

[Rhodolfo]

This same issue started to happen last night. I have always been able to ask Google Nest Mini to play my personalized playlists, but it is not working anymore.

[twikigrrl]

An update: I have been having this issue for months. I have finally found a way to make it work. A few of my playlists WOULD work but the majority would not. Here is what I found:

1. Playlists must be very very unique names. Nothing that can be construed as a general playlist, telling me that in the Google  search order, they no longer look at personal playlists first. If they find something in the general public playlists, they play those first/preferentially (when it should absolutely be the other way around, where personal playlists are preferential first - or at least give us a unique phrase to use to indicate a search of our playlists first!)

examples: I’ve had to rename a lot of my playlists to things like Xxxxxx for Angie, so that it’s unique to me.

2. Absolutely ZERO punctuation can be in the playlist name. No apostrophes, no em dashes, no dashes, nothing. Given the rule of #1, I had originally used a lot of playlist names like “Angie’s Xxx” or “stuff angie likes - xxxx genre”. This tells me that either Spotify or Google programmers are not “escaping” the punctuation as they should prior to the data being searched.

Once I renamed the playlists getting rid of every bit of punctuation, along with making them very very unique to me -  everything is now working as it should.

[-adler-]

This was not working for a long time for me, I unlinked it and relinked in the Google Home App in Media and it is working now using the voice command "Hey Google shuffle (playlist name)" or "Hey Google play (playlist name)".

[Jeremy]

Hi there folks,

Hope you're doing well!

We just want to double check if you still experiencing this?

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

Take care!

[twikigrrl]

I found a solution myself. It turned out that I needed two things: 1) a
unique name for the playlist because Google does not seem to search
personal playlists first /preferentially and b) absolutely zero punctuation
can be used in the playlist. No apostrophe, no dashes, no parenthesis,
because it appears Google doesn’t “escape” them. If you rename your lists
to something without punctuation AND something unique it will work.

Or we could ask Google and Spotify to coordinate better together on the
code they write so it makes sense.

[depot]

I am currently having this issue. I have a brand new Moto g stylus 5G 2022 running Android 12 and the latest version of Spotify.

[Novy]

Hey folks, 

Thanks for your patience. 

Is anyone still experiencing this issue? If so, make sure to let us know the exact Spotify version you're currently running. 

We'll be on the lookout.