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Google’sNest Huband Nest Hub Max smart displays are excellent for controlling your smart home and video chatting with family or friends. For better or worse, the latter functionality is the new way of doing business and staying in touch with people you need to connect with frequently. Smart displays allow you to chat hands-free without using your phone or computer, and the Nest Hub Max, with its 6.5MP camera, was specifically designed for this purpose. However, this is about to change as Google appears to be killing the smart display’s video calling functionality later this month.
A Nest Hub Max user took toRedditto report seeing a Google Meet prompt on the smart display warning them that joining meetings would be unavailable by the end of September (via9to5Google). Google’s support pages for bothGoogle Meetand the Nest Hub Max make no mention of the end of video calling support as of this time, but we’ve reached out to the search giant for confirmation.
Meet video calling isn’t the only service on its way out. On September 30, Zoom will discontinue support for the smart display. According to the company’ssupport page, Zoom apps will no longer work on the Hub Max and will stop receiving updates after that. Once the shutdown takes effect, users will be unable to install the app or sign in to their accounts.
This comes just a few months after Googlepulled the plug on Assistant gamesand voice apps for the Nest Hub in June, which was not surprising given that not many people were keen on playing games on their smart displays anyway. But removing the only thing that makes the Nest Hub Max useful seems a bit drastic. That said, the display’s camera will continue to be useful for theLook and Talk feature, which lets you talk to the Assistant without having to say “Hey Google.”
While Google has yet to say a word about this change, the end of support may be ushered in by the company’s renewed focus on its LLM (large language model) technology. An internal e-mail sent to Google employees and obtained byAxiosrevealed Mountain View’s plan to supercharge its digital assistant with the same generative AI powering ChatGPT.
While Google kicked off this effort with Assistant’s mobile version, it’s a safe bet that the same initiative will bleed intosmart displaysand speakers, as9to5 noted. Given that these devices are designed to work with voice commands, we imagine Google Bard talking to you instead of just typing its responses in the future.
UPDATE: 2025-07-18 07:56 EST BY JAY BONGGOLTO
Google issued a statement regarding video calling on the Nest Hub Max
Google clarified in an email to Android Police that you can still make “1:1 and group video calls to friends, family and businesses with Google Meet.” However, joining meetings via meeting codes and links in Meet will no longer be possible at the end of September.
