Fossil is re-adding Google Assistant to Gen 6 smartwatches

Fossil has released an update for the Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch series. This allows the clocks to run Google Assistant again. Users of the Gen 6 smartwatches were no longer able to use Google’s voice assistant since their switch 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, like Engadget. Droid Life writes that a system update is required, but also that the accompanying Fossil Smartwatches app for Android has received an update. Both are required to activate the Google Assistant on the smartwatch series.

Google announced Wear OS 3 in 2021. The new OS was developed together with Samsung and is said to make smartwatches faster and more economical. In 2021, the American company expressed the expectation that partner companies such as Fossil would implement a Wear OS 3 upgrade for their smartwatches from mid-2022. In October of 2022 the time had come came Fossil with a Wear OS 3 update for the Gen 6 smartwatches. However, that update meant that users could no longer use Google Assistant. Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, remained available.

The Fossil Gen 6 smartwatches came onto the market in the fall of 2021. The clocks 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.