Sorry, Alexa and Siri. These 5 Google Home Features Make Me Love It More

in the battle for smart home supremacy, the Google home has been for a long time considered an outsider. After all, Apple Rival HomePod devices are Siri-powered smart gadgets packed with Apple-style innovations. And with nearly 70% of the market share, Amazon Echo devices with Alexa are extremely popular, constantly surpassing all other brands of smart speakers handsets and connect to almost every other smart gadget on the planet. For a while, the Google Home ecosystem was caught in the middle, until a deluge of updates over the past few months began to shift the dial.

When it comes to digital assistants, I use them all. Every day, I trust Siri to manage my iPhone and Apple tv tasks with aplomb, but until recently Alexa and Google Assistant distributed the tasks of the smart home fairly evenly in my house. Now the only thing I still use an Amazon Echo for is playing music through much better speakers connected to Alexa’s audio port – a physical connection that no Google Home or Nest speaker does. has never sported.

Yes, Google Home and Google Assistant have come this far in such a short time. But don’t take my word for it. Try out my top five favorite Google Home tips and tricks that will leave you wondering if the smart home race isn’t even a contest anymore.

Turn off timers and alarms at “Stop” speed

One thing I still can’t get over is how annoying is to invoke the Google Assistant. “Hey, Google” and “OK, Google” don’t come out as gracefully as “Alexa” or even “Hey, Siri”. Fortunately, Google’s platform makes up for its clunky trigger phrase by completely eliminating it when you cancel the incessant ringing of a timer or alarm.

That’s right – the next time an alarm, timer, or other similar reminder goes off on your Google Home, you will lose your breath if you yell “Hey, Google.” Just shout, “Stop!” and the Google Home will obey. (You don’t have to yell the word stop, especially if you have Google Assistant increased wake-up call sensitivity on your speaker, but it’s definitely more fun if you do.) If you set kitchen timers or other reminders throughout the day as often as I did, you’ll never set an alarm with it again. another digital assistant.

Now, if only the Google Home could silence an alarm in another room as you can easily do with Alexa …

Plan tasks for the future

I eat at night. A lot. In a zombie state between the waking world and sleeping, I’m lucky if I remember to close the cereal box or put the milk back in the fridge, let alone turn off the kitchen lights when I go back to bed. Or sometimes I realize that I forgot to program my Coffee machine just as I passed out in dreamland, and wished I could program it using just my voice.

Enter Google Home with the most amazing solution to a problem I never even realized could be solved – scheduled tasks. The Google Assistant can now schedule tasks for the future, so that you give the command when it comes to you, not just the hope that you will remember it when the time comes. Check out our guide to get the most out of these Google Home scheduled tasks here, but the main thing is to just tell Google Home when you want it to do a particular action, like this:

• “Hey, Google, turn off the kitchen lights in ten minutes.”
• “OK, Google, make coffee at 8 a.m.”
• “Hey, Google, turn on the porch light for 30 minutes.”

Try this with Siri and it’ll tell you it can’t schedule any orders. Alexa will do what you ask immediately instead of waiting. Be forewarned – this feature is getting addicting and fast.

Plan a full day with Workday and Family Bell

Speaking of planning, for the Type A personalities out there … Every smart home assistant worthy of their digital salt has a way of creating custom commands, usually referred to as routines. But Google recently introduced two giant scheduling tools that can fine-tune your agenda so that Alexa and Siri can’t come close to imitation.

Workday is designed to help you stay active individually during your work hours: it will remind you to get up and stretch, take your afternoon coffee break, or start packing things up towards the end of your shift. day. Family Bell is more about organizing your entire team and alerting your family when it’s time, for example, to spend the next hour doing crafts or meeting in the kitchen for lunch. We give step by step instructions for routine patterns here (scroll to the second subsection of this linked article for details).

Move your music around the house on the fly

If smart speakers were only judged on their apps, the Google Home would easily outwit the competition. Its application interface is the simplest, the most intuitive to use and, let’s face it, the prettiest to look at. And it helps you easily manage one of the most common tasks in the smart home.

I am talking about multiroom multimedia controls. To get started, open the Google Home app and press the Media button. From there it’s pretty self-explanatory, but you can refer to our multiroom music tutorial detailed here for tips and tricks to try the next time you want to create custom realtime speaker groups. Siri and Alexa both allow you to play through different sets of speakers scattered throughout your home, but neither offer such easy-to-master controls.

Take advantage of Google Home’s Goldilocks Zone Brief Mode

One of the most popular features of Alexa is the platform “brief mode” reducing chatter‘which allows Amazon Echo devices to respond to certain commands with a simple chime (instead of repeating the command verbatim). But even this popular setting is far from perfect. On the one hand, it is an all or nothing proposition. Either Alexa says to confirm, or she’s chatting with your ear, with no real option in between. (Siri doesn’t have a comparable feature, so he must stay away this round.)

Google Home has its own kind of brief mode, if you make a few adjustments behind the scenes. It can be a bit hairy at first, but it’s worth it.

Basically, a Google Home will acknowledge commands with a chime as long as: 1) the device you are talking to is grouped together in the same room as the device or devices you want to control and 2) those other devices are identified as lights in Google Home Application. This means you’ll have to lie a bit if you want a Google Home to silently control, say, a heater or anything other than a light, identifying it as a “light” in the Google Application for the House.

I promise, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. We have more detailed instructions here, and once you’ve gotten over the initial hurdle of setting it up correctly, navigation is smooth from there. And of course, if you only want to control the lighting, just set up the rooms as you normally would and Google Home will take care of the rest.

While Google continues to add features throughout 2021 like the Zoom calls, new home and outdoor modes and compatibility with competing music services he added in 2020, maybe a year from now, asking if Google Home is an underdog or a category winner will be as pointless as yelling “Hey, Google” before yelling “Stop!”