Category: Google Home

With all of the announcements around Google Home and Google Assistant yesterday at Google’s big product event, it is not surprising that we are starting to see new functionality come into the products.  One of the new functions that you can do with Assistant is send information that you have searched for to your phone so you can get to it while on the go.  It saves you from having to do the search again from your phone.

How it works is pretty straight forward.  On your Google Home, ask Assistant about something and then follow it up with “OK Google, send this to my phone”.  For example, “OK Google, what was the score of the Rockies game?”  Google will give you the sad loss of the Rockies to the Diamondbacks last night.  As soon as Assistant finishes, say “OK Google, send this to my phone” and the results are sent to you phone via a notification.  Tap that notification and you can get that information.

At the Google event this morning in San Francisco, the new Google Home Mini was officially announced with availability starting later this month.  The hockey puck style Home Mini is designed to integrate into the décor of any home without being intrusive.  It comes in three colors, coral, chalk and charcoal.

Like Google Home, the Mini has Google Assistant built-in and works seamlessly with existing Google Home to make it available in every room.  It can also be apart of the new Broadcast feature that is coming to Home so a message can be sent to every Home in the house.

Google Assistant has grown up a lot in the past year thanks to developers and services leveraging APIs to create services for it.  While Assistant still lags behind Amazon’s Alexa when it comes to the number of services available, the gap is closing.

That presents a challenge for users who are looking for a service or feature but aren’t quite sure if it is there.  Google has addressed this and made it easy to find services for Google Assistant right from within it or the Google Home app.  Now you can simply type in a keyword to search and the Assistant will return all of the services that do that particular thing that you searched.

Last month, Google and Walmart made an announcement that shopping for the retailer would be coming to Google Express and Google Home.  That agreement has now gone live and you can find Walmart in the app as a shopping option.

Users will be able to link their Walmart online account with Google Express and shop a wide range of products from the retailer, mostly focused on groceries, and have them added to your Express shopping list.  They are then shipped to your home and if you spend over $35, the shipping is free.

Google Home has a server-side update rolling out that brings a much desired feature to the Smart Speaker device:  Hands-free calling.  Home users in the United States & Canada will now have the ability to place a call to a local business or a contact by saying, “Hey Google, call (business or contact)”.  It is a feature that was highlighted earlier this year at Google I/O as Google continues to improve the device.

The new feature means that instead of having to pick up your mobile, you can simply make a call from any Google Home device you have in your home.  Obviously the call is broadcasted via the speaker built into the device so private calls should still be dealt with from your phone.

Google has acknowledged that they are working on a reasonably significant bug between Google Home and Google Play Music.  The issue varies from user-to-user but most are experiencing one of two issues.  First, purchased music is not showing up in their libraries and is not playable.  Second, entire libraries for some artists are not searchable or playable.  What makes it interesting is that if you open up the Google Play Music app and Cast the songs in question to Google Home, they will play.

The issue was discussed in detail in a post in the Google Product Forums for Google Home.  There, users were encouraged to use the Send Feedback feature within the Home app to send detailed information to Google so they can continue to investigate.  Right now, there isn’t a fix available.