Earlier this year, Google surprised us with the launch of a second-gen Nest Hub. With improved performance and a lower price, it was an easy recommendation for first-time buyers. However, its big new feature, sleep tracking, wasn't quite as powerful as we hoped it would be. More than six months after release, Google has returned to give the Nest Hub a boost for sleep tracking — along with some more details on when the feature might cost money to use.

Sleep staging is the most significant improvement here, utilizing new algorithms to help chart your progression during the night. The Nest Hub uses its Soli sensors to more accurately detect both the quality and duration of each of your stages of sleep: light, deep, REM, and awake. In the morning, you'll receive a complete chart showing exactly when you were fully asleep, along with exact time periods for all four stages.

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According to Google's AI blog, improved training is the biggest difference between this new iteration and the original feature. Sleep tracking now predicts the user's sleep stages rather than looking for a basic sleep-wake status. Using public data from multiple sleep studies, the company utilized more than 10,000 sessions with polysomnography data to build its new algorithm.

Google is combining this with an update to sound detection, which now limits its tracking area to listen for noise. This change should prevent coughs and snores made by significant others from being counted as your own. The Nest Hub will show these in an "Other sounds" group, which means you can finally prove your partner is snoring every night.

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When the second-gen Hub initially hit store shelves in the spring, Google made it clear that sleep tracking wouldn't be free forever. Part of our hesitance in recommending the sleep tracking at all was the promise of a switch to a subscription model, and we're finally learning what that might entail with this upgrade. Although Nest Hub users will be able to keep using sleep tracking for free through 2022, the feature will require a paid Fitbit Premium subscription sometime in 2023.

That plan is pretty expensive — $9.99 per month or $80 annually — especially when you consider that not every Nest Hub owner has a Fitbit. On the other hand, the good news is that current subscribers won't need to pay any additional fees for tracking. Instead, it'll be built into the plan they already have.

These improvements to sleep tracking arrive on second-gen Nest Hub in the coming weeks, just in time for the incoming holiday shopping season.