Google Home has a new cloud-side update that brings a handy and much needed feature to the smart speaker. It is now location aware and will only adjust the Smart Home items in the room it is located in, not just across the entire home. Google hasn’t announced this year but the team over at Android Police posted on it yesterday and I can confirm it works for me too.
The problem this solves is straight forward. Prior to this update, if I issued the command, “Hey Google, turn off the lights”, it would turn off all the smart lights in my house, regardless of their location. With this update, if I issue the same command, it will only adjust the lights in the room in which my Google Home picked me up. This is were tagging like “Living Room”, “Office” and other areas become key.
I have this a test last night and it worked like a champ. In my office, I issued the command to turn off the light and it turned off my desk lamp as expected. My other smart lights throughout the home however remained on. Now to be fair, you could do this before by adding “in this room” to your command or “in the office” but this flows a bit more naturally.
Google hasn’t come out and said anything about this yet so I don’t know if they will post something on it later today or next week or it will simply remain an undocumented feature. Either way, it’s handy if you have multiple smart devices that you are controlling from your Google Home.
