post Google Home - personal playlist in automations in Other Devices

Google Home - personal playlist in automations

SandySaysArf — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:23:56 GMT

Google Home will play Pandora personal playlists from a voice command, but not when the play command is included in an automation. It was working fine, then stopped working, then started again. Last I checked it was not working.

Re: Google Home - personal playlist in automations

TannerPandora — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:06:30 GMT

Hi @SandySaysArf

Thanks for sharing those details. Sorry for any frustration around your automations and playing Pandora.

To help get a better understanding of what’s happening with your Google Home automation, I have a few questions:

When the automation runs, what exactly happens?

Does nothing play at all, or does it play something different than expected?
Do you hear any error message from Google Assistant?
Could you share the exact phrase or command included in your automation?
How is the automation set up?
- Is it a scheduled routine, or triggered by something (like a voice command, time of day, etc.)?

Just to confirm, Pandora is still set as your default music service in the Google Home app?

Let me know when you get a chance!

Re: Google Home - personal playlist in automations

SandySaysArf — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:10:30 GMT

First of all, yes, Pandora is set as my default music app. I have been battling this issue off and on for months, testing different commands. Under Actions>Play music I put 'My Pandora playlist Sandy 273.' It plays my Thumbprint radio. No error message. By the way, it plays curated stations but not personal playlists. I have other automations where I tried personal playlists and I have the same issue. ( I posted this before and the message deleted text and said 'ahem.' What does that mean?)

Oh, and the automation is triggered by voice command.

Moderator Edit: Merged posts

Re: Google Home - personal playlist in automations

TannerPandora — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:38:29 GMT

Hi @SandySaysArf

Thanks for following up and sharing those details, I really appreciate you sticking with this.

To help us take a closer look, could you share a screenshot of your automation setup? You can upload images directly here on the community (this works best from a mobile device or web browser, email replies won’t support attachments).

Also, you mentioned trying a few different commands, have you had any success with any variations? For example, does changing the station name from “Sandy 273” to something else make any difference?

Thanks again for your patience in the meantime.

Re: Google Home - personal playlist in automations

SandySaysArf — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:46:00 GMT

As I said, it worked before. It's been very squirrelly. At some point it made a hard distinction between "station" and "playlist" and stopped working. I changed my command to playlist and it worked for a few weeks. Then it would stop again. It's still working from automations for curated lists, such as "Dinner Jazz Radio." Google Home blames the problem on Pandora (of course), saying that I have to have Pandora Premium to play personal playlists (I have Plus), but Home plays personal playlists with verbal commands. And it did it before and now it doesn't, and my Pandora account level didn't change.
"Sandy 273" used to be my personal playlist which I named "Sandy's Classical." That worked fine for months and then suddenly Google Home would play a station for a classical violinist whose first name happened to be Sandy. Other playlists I had did the same sort of thing. I think Google's AI transition thinks I'm trying to search rather than respond to an exact command.

Re: Google Home - personal playlist in automations

TannerPandora — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:45:46 GMT

Hi @SandySaysArf

Thanks for the follow up, and sorry for my delay. I appreciate your patience.

Voice commands can definitely be tricky, especially if Google has adjusted how requests are interpreted over time. Just to clarify from the Pandora side, with a Plus subscription your listening experience is centered around radio stations, not playlists. It does sound like you were able to access your stations while using the term “playlist” in your voice commands for a while, but that behavior wouldn’t technically align with the expected Plus experience, so it may have been working incidentally rather than as a consistently supported feature.

You may have better luck adding phrasing like “radio” or “station” to both your station name and your voice commands (for example, “Play Sandy 273 Radio”) to help get more consistent results.

One thing I’m curious about, do you know if your Google devices are running on the newer Gemini experience, or still using the classic Google Assistant? That change could potentially impact how commands are interpreted.

In the meantime, I’ve passed along your experience with voice commands and automations to our engineering team for further review, as this type of behavior typically isn’t something standard troubleshooting would help to resolve.

Thanks again for sharing all of this with us and for your patience.