It has been a good week for Google Home users. First came the integration with Netflix and Google Photos earlier in the week. Second, and just yesterday, a slew of new bots were added to Google Home to help you get news, information, how to’s and even play games, all from voice commands to your Home. The new bots, 34 of them in all, are available under the Services section of the app on your Android phone. I’m referring to them as bots because you have to specifically tell Home which service to talk to and you get automated information back from that service. It is much like a chat bot – just using your voice instead.
The list of services is pretty impressive and all of them are enabled by default. You just have to tell Home which one you want to access. This is done by saying “Hey Google, let me talk to
Here is the list of services that are now available on Google Home.
Google Home Services Bots
- 21 Blackjack
- Akinator the genie
- Anchor
- And Chill
- Argus
- Ask Jelly
- busuu – language learning
- CNBC
- Domino’s
- Eliza
- ELLE Horoscopes by The Astro Twins
- FitStar Personal Trainer
- Food Network
- Genius
- Headspace
- HuffPost Headline Quiz
- itcher
- Lonely Planet
- NBC News
- NPR One
- Number Genie
- Product Hunt
- Quora
- Quotery
- SongPop
- Sub War
- Tender
- The Bartender
- The Wall Street Journal
- Todoist
- Trivia Blast
- VentureBeat News
- WebMD
- Wonder
Each service acts a bit different so the best thing to do is to go to the Home app on your phone, go to More Settings>Services and you will see the complete list. Note that on some services, like Dominos, you will need to link your account for things to work properly.
These updates this week to Google Home are exciting and it is great to see Google getting things ramped up on it quickly. As I put in my review, there is a lot of growing room for the device and I still feel that way. These updates, however, are clearly a step in the right direction.
