Google Home Max is coming to Australia. The largest of the Google Home family devices will be coming on August 9th to a variety of retailers at a price of $549 AU, roughly $406 US. That’s a bit more than the $399 here in the US but not by much.
The news came from the Official Google Australia blog today and it makes Australia the third country where Google Home Max is available after the United States and Canada.
Over the course of yesterday, many Google Home and Chromecast users reported issues with the devices. In the case of Home, commands were not being accepted while with Chromecast devices, casting would not work. The issue was reasonably widespread.
Late yesterday, Google’s Made By Google Twitter account posted that a fix would be rolling out over the follow six hour (i.e. overnight) to fix the issue.
We have a fix for Google Home and Chromecast. It will automatically roll out within the next 6 hours. To get back up and running now, reboot your device → https://t.co/CM4ov63F46. Thanks for sticking with us!
— Made by Google (@madebygoogle) June 27, 2018
At this point, this fix should have rolled out to everyone.
Over the course of the past few weeks, there has been a lot of activity around Google Assistant, Google Home, and the Spanish language. First there was the support for three dialects of Spanish, then Google Home becoming available in Spain. Today we see all of this come together with Google announcing that Google Home now can speak Spanish.
With this update, which has already rolled out via a cloud side update, you can now configure Google Home to speak Spanish as you interact with it in your day-to-day activities or ask it to complete specific commands. Considering that nearly 6% of the world’s population speaks Spanish, which is more than English speakers, it is a huge step forward for Google Home and Google Assistant.
Google has quietly added a great new feature to the Google Home lineup: Sleep Timers. According to an updated support page from the company, you can now set timers to play music for a specific duration of time as you prepare for bed or have Home play that lullaby for the little ones. As with most Google Assistant commands for Home, it is pretty easy to setup.
The most basic way to setup a sleep timer with music is to say, “Hey Google, play (artist/genre/playlist) for (duration)”. If you are just wanting a sleep timer, just say, “Hey Google, set a sleep timer for (duration)”. You can also set up a sleep timer to stop at a certain time (say, 9:30 p.m.). It is actually quite flexible in how you set up the timers. While these fall under the category of sleep timers, you can use them for other purposes. For example, you could set a time for 30 minutes with mediation music as you meditate in the morning. Once the music stops, you know your session has ended.