Last year I documented at great length a mess I went through when a very straightforward morning radio alarm I had set on my bedroom smart speaker had to be replaced by a Google "automation". That post ended with my having successfully implemented a solution.
Well, that was then and this is now. Google recently introduced Android 16 and I recently upgraded my phone from a Pixel 6a to a Pixel 9a. One or both of those events killed my morning alarm. Instead of hearing Google's voice telling me "streaming NPR on WKAR" (my local NPR radio station), I heard "OK, here's a playlist from YouTube Music" followed by some noises that I suspect are used to soften up presumed terrorist before interrogating them.
This was baffling in several ways, starting with the fact that I have never, ever instructed Google to play random music from YouTube Music early in the morning. More baffling is that when I went into the Google automation settings, my morning routine was still there, still marked enabled, and still listed as doing the same things: playing the radio (station = WKAR FM) on the bedroom speaker. Manually triggering it, however, did not work.
I have no idea what the problem was (is), but I eventually found a work around. I changed the "action" setting from playing the radio (one of a menu of possibilities controlled by a multiple select input) to a "custom" action (selected via "Try adding your own (Experiment with custom actions)". That opens a text input where you can type pretty much anything you might verbally ask Google Assistant to do. In my case that meant "Stream WKAR FM radio". To date, that has worked, which I assume means Google has engineers working on a fix for it.
If any Google engineers are reading this, may I recommend consulting the "Redneck Repair Manual" (page 1): "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
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