The new version can track your sleep with radar

Google on Tuesday unveiled the second-generation Nest Hub, a smart display and speaker that can track your sleep using a built-in radar sensor. It will launch on March 30 for $ 99, but customers can order it starting Tuesday.

This is the latest way Google is trying to differentiate its smart home hub from similar devices sold by Amazon and Facebook, and it’s the first to offer sleep tracking.

The second-generation Nest Hub is similar to the first model, which was first launched in 2018. It has a 7-inch screen that you can use to watch streaming video services, view the weather forecast, receive alerts, the lights to put on and more. The newer model also has better speakers that provide 50% more bass than the first model.

But the real new trick is that radar sensor.

Users can place the new Nest Hub near where they sleep, such as on a bedside table, and it will walk them through a ‘Sleep Detection’ setup process, which will help fine-tune the radar to where you sleep in bed. Google said it can measure micro-movements, such as the movement of your chest while breathing, to determine when you’re sleeping. Microphones can determine if you are snoring or coughing, and other built-in sensors can determine the temperature in the room and the brightness of the lights. It takes all this information and tells you how well you slept and can then make recommendations, such as a reminder to go to bed at a certain time to improve consistency, or to try meditating with a relaxation routine before going to bed is going.

While it can be useful, it seems like Google is trying to put the radar sensor in every product it can think of. It was developed as part of Project Soli, which was first introduced in 2015. Soli made its debut in the Pixel 4 phone, which lets you skip tracks by waving your hand across the screen, but was removed in the Pixel 5. It has since been introduced in a new model of the Nest Thermostat, where it is used to see if you are near the thermometer.

The new Nest Hub doesn’t have a camera, so it can’t see what you’re doing in bed. And Google showed CNBC a sample of the spectrogram that the radar sensor sees – it looks like a bunch of messy lines. Still, people may be concerned about a device near their bed that will know when they are moving or sleeping. Here’s an example of what the radar sees:

Google said all radar and audio data on the device is analyzed and not sent to Google. But the information about how well you slept is uploaded to the cloud if you want to sync it with Google Fit, the company’s centralized health app that pulls data from other devices such as phones and smartwatches. Google said you can delete your sleep report for the night after sleeping. And you can delete all data at any time.

Sleep Sensing will be free for the next year. Google said it has not yet decided whether it will charge any more for it.

Google recently acquired Fitbit, which also offers sleep tracking through its wearables. The company said this product is for people who don’t wear a sleep tracker in bed, but didn’t say if this option is more accurate than the pulse sensors.

The radar can also be used for other things. For example, you can raise your hand to pause music, or raise your hand to snooze an alarm. That’s comparable to the functionality built into the Google Home Hub Max, which has a camera to enable those interactions. But otherwise, this product is mainly intended for people who do not yet have the first-generation model or who really want the sleep registration.