Category: Google Home

Actions for Google Assistant continue to be added at a pretty fast clip and most of them we don’t hear much about.  They just show up in the Assistant app on your phone and then you can use them there or on your Google Home.  However, every once in a while, Google highlights a new Action like that have with Tasty.

Tasty.co is a fantastic recipe site that gives you step-by-step instructions and videos to cook just about anything.  Now it is even easier by simply asking your Google Home to talk to Tasty.

A few weeks ago Spanish support for Google Assistant was added in what at the time looked like a precursor to Google Home being available in the country.  Today that has proven to be the case.  Now on the Spanish Google Store site, you can order a Google Home for €149 (roughly $172) and a Google Home Mini for €59 (roughly $68).

While Spain was expected due to the the Assistant support, the fact that Austria and Ireland also now has Home available came as a bit of a surprise.  Google had not previously announced these two countries, but given the rate of expansion that the Mountain View company has aimed for in 2018 both with Assistant and Home, it isn’t too big of a surprise.

A small, quiet update has rolled out to Google Assistant that allows you to set your default language in three Spanish dialects.  The update, which is a cloud-side update, allows for users to set España, México, and EE.UU as their default language.

The addition of these different dialects almost assuredly means that expansion of Google Home into Mexico and Spain is just around the corner as that has been Google’s pattern in previous Google Home and Google Assistant expansions this year.

It has taken a while, a lot longer than it should have frankly, but Google Home is now finally able to start up a movie or television show from Google Play Movies & TV.  The feature quietly snuck into Home and Google Assistant this week during Google I/O and didn’t get a lot of fanfare but it closes a loop in Google’s support of their own products.

If you have a Google Home and you have movies or television shows you have rented or purchased in Play Movies & TV, you can now ask Google Assistant to play a movie in your account to a Chromecast device in your home.  It works just like it does with Netflix and other services that are already supported by Home & Assistant.

Today in Mountain View, California, the home of Google, the tech giant will be kicking off their annual developers conference.  Google I/O is one of the more important events and is the second developer conference going on this week behind Microsoft’s Build conference.

The event kicks off this morning at 10:00 am Pacific (1:00 pm Eastern) with the keynote address from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.  You can watch the streaming of his keynote on the Google I/O site, https://google.com/io for free.

The expansion of Google Assistant and Google Home globally continues with India becoming the latest country where you can buy the smart speakers.  The Home and Home Mini are now available there and support a wide range of apps and services found in country.  As for price, the Google Home is  ₹9,999 (roughly $154 US) while the Home Mini is  ₹4,499, or $69 US.  Both are available exclusively through Flipkart.

While Google recently rolled out Hindi support for Google Assistant, they aren’t supported in India on the Home devices just yet.  For now, users will have to use English (India) as their settings but Hindi support is expected shortly.