When you buy a "smart" version of a product, you expect it to behave like the regular version but better, with more features, and to be more practical. Unfortunately though for many Nest Hello owners, their new smart camera doorbell wasn't doing its main job well enough. It wasn't acting like a proper doorbell and notifying them of visitors in a timely manner. Nest is now acknowledging the issue and starting an investigation into what's causing it.

There are many reports online of the Nest Hello's delayed notifications and random WiFi disconnections (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and much more) going back several months ago, so Nest had to eventually buckle down and admit there's a problem. Now the company is saying that it's working to improve these delays and is asking users to be a little patient while it implements the bug-free changes needed to fix them. In the meantime, Nest will provide complimentary Aware subscription for every affected doorbell; the company says it will reach out to those who voiced their complaints in the community.

The post also mentions two other changes Nest is considering: the ability to record both sides of a conversation in the video (including the owner's voice) and the option to set a shorter cool down period between notifications. If you're a Nest Hello owner and you've experienced any of these issues before, you should check out the full statement in the link below and reach out to Nest for your complimentary Aware subscription.

UPDATE: 2018/09/03 4:09am PDT BY

And just like that, Nest has now removed the official statement (linked below) from its Community forum (and it seems they also removed the Google cache page, so we can't link to that). Many users are telling us that reaching out to support to ask about the complimentary Aware subscription is yielding a lot of virtual blank stares. We've reached out to Nest for clarification and will update this post if/when they get back to us.

UPDATE: 2018/09/04 5:12am PDT BY

We've received three tips from users who have been contacted by Nest Support after voicing concerns about the Hello Doorbell on the community forums. All of them got the same message:

I’m reaching out in response to your post on the Nest Community.

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been experiencing issues with your Nest Hello. I’ve created a case to document this and we’d like to update it with info about the issues you’ve been having so we can investigate this further. Can you write us back letting us know the details of the issues you’ve been having?

We also want to thank you for your continued patience and would like to offer two months of complimentary Nest Aware. If this is something you would like to take us up on, please let us know.

Nest's original post acknowledging the issue is still deleted and the company hasn't replied to our request for comment yet.

Thanks: Rich, Jason, JewishMoFo

Source: Nest Community

Thanks: Jeremy David Sandock, Alexis Menard