How to add a remote chime to a Nest Hello doorbell

In our IoT Podcast Hotline voicemail this week, we received a question from someone who recently switched from a Ring doorbell to a Nest Hello. The Ring supports additional chimes so you can hear the doorbell around the home, but the Nest Hello doesn’t. Well, it does, but Nest doesn’t actually sell remote chimes.

Instead, you can use any Google Home speaker or display to act as a remote chime for the Nest Hello. And if the Google Home device is a smart display, you can also see the person at your door.

The instructions to set up a Google Home device as a Nest Hello chime seem quite simple, but there are some potential gotchas that can make the process a little more challenging. Here are the steps:

1. First (and this one of the gotchas since it’s not intuitive to this process), enable Personal Results in the Google Home app. To do this, tap the Google Home device(s) you want to act as a doorbell chime, click the settings icon for that device and then look for the “More” option to find the Personal Results switch. Note that this will allow your Google app data from Gmail, Calendar, Photos, etc.. to be accessed from the Home device. Some people may not wish to allow this, of course.
2. Switch over the Nest app and tap the Settings icon. Look for the “Visitor Announcements” option and enable it. When I did this, the Nest app directed me to the Google Assistant app, saying to acknowledge and prompts. I never got the prompts, but perhaps you will.

And that’s it! Keep in mind that your Google Home “remote chime” will only sound when someone actually rings the Nest Hello doorbell. You won’t hear any chimes or announcements based on motion detection.

Again, there’s no official remote chime device made by Nest, but as part of Google, the integration is there between the Nest Hello and Google Home products. To hear the question in full, as well as our discussion about it, tune in below to this week’s IoT Podcast.