Plex’s Google assistant integration is producing unexpected result on some searches. Referencing material (artist, albums, tracks) from Plex’s music library may be ignored or produce an error that says Plex isn’t available in my country.
Say “play (the) SOMEARTISTNAME” - never brings up Plex results
Say “play (the) SOMEARTISTNAME in Plex” - brings up Plex not available in country error
BUILD AFFECTED:
6.10.0.2813
REGRESSION:
6.9.0.2683
Same issue
OTHER DETAILS:
Plex is not available as a Music Source when configuring Google Assistant for default music handler (requires other Android or iOS Device and the Google Assistant App)
@TVPlexHD
Could you test something? Could you test what “SOME ARTIST on Plex” shows from Google Assistant (if it displays Plex-related information about the artist)?
We are asking NVIDIA and Google about what the Google Assistant is able to handle in terms of music content, to let you know if that’s a Google Assistant issue or a Plex app one.
I’m going to update to the current beta to test something else and will try this there as well, using the specific “… ON PLEX” terms. I’ll provide specific examples when I report back.
I tested with the same results in both 6.12.0.3239 and today’s 6.13.0.3362
Saying specifically “ARTIST NAME on Plex” or “ARTIST NAME in Plex” will bring up results in the typical Google horizontal scrolling list. The results will say the name of the artist and “TV Library” underneath. This will also match album names at the same time and in the case of one query for “The Charlatans” brings up multiple identical photos (the album cover) with the same text so it’s not obvious which one is the artist and which is the album.
I have a Plex Home set up with one admin user and 3 managed and the results and action after selection were different depending on whether I had no one or a particular managed account active.
When I first fired up the Shield there was no active user and the results brought back were DOUBLED. There were 4 images for “The Charlatans” plus 2 more for “The Charlatans and The Chemical Brothers” - selecting one of these opened Plex at the user selection screen. Selecting a managed user then opened Plex at the top of the complete server library - nothing was selected. The same as just having opened Plex directly from it own icon without any query/search.
Now that this user was active, going back to the Leanback home screen and repeating the query showed 3 images total, with two being identical (already mentioned above). 1 for the artist, 1 for the self-titled album (same image) and one for the Chemical Brothers album (shared artist which is OK).
Selecting an image open Plex at the user selection screen again. Picking the same managed account I had before, it then displays focused on whatever I had selected - the artist page for The Charlatans for the first image or the specific album for the second.
Anything involving any variation of the word “play” as a voice command continues (of course) to produce the “not available in your country” error.
@TVPlexHDHere you can find a list of the available commands the Google Assistant handles in the Android TV platform. As you can see, “Play seomthing on any app” doesn’t seem to be on the list so for now that command is not available.
About the duplicated info for music searchs, I can open an internal ticket to take a look and improve the information displayed for those results.
If you would, please file a bug report with Google as the error received when “play something on app” doesn’t make any sense - and that query format needs to be added to match the behavior of movies.
Also, Plex is unable to be added as a music provider which means that even using the example search method of “play some_music_name” will never bring up Plex results. Getting that taken care of would alleviate other concerns, because the beauty of this kind of assistant is not having to specify the app in the first place. I don’t need to specify Plex when I ask for a movie.
