Fossil has released an update for the Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch series. This will allow the clocks to run Google Assistant again. Users of Gen 6 smartwatches have been unable to use Google’s voice assistant since moving to Wear OS 3.
The update was discovered by readers from tech website Droid Life and has been confirmed by editors of other news media, such as Engadget. Droid Life writes that a system update will be involved, but also that the accompanying Fossil Smartwatches app for Android has been updated. Both are needed to activate the Google Assistant on the smartwatch series.
Google has Wear OS 3 announced in 2021. The new OS was developed together with Samsung and would make smartwatches faster and more economical. The American company in 2021 expressed the expectation that partner companies such as Fossil would implement a Wear OS 3 upgrade to their smartwatches from mid-2022. In October of 2022 the time had come and Fossil arrived with a Wear OS 3 update for the Gen 6 smartwatches. However, that update prevented users from using Google Assistant. Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, remained available.
The Fossil Gen 6 smartwatches came on the market in the fall of 2021. The watches run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100+ soc, support Bluetooth 5.0, have a 1.28″ OLED screen with 416×416 pixels and 1GB RAM. The storage space is 8GB.
