Tag: 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.

Good news today for those of you who use Fandango to get your movie tickets.  You can now use Google Assistant on your phone to find movie times near you and order your tickets all with voice commands.   You can continue to use the Fandango app of course but now you have a voice enabled option.  Sweet!

The feature only works on Assistant on your phone and while you can ask your Google Home for details, it is going to move the process over to your phone to complete it.  Hopefully it’ll get fully enabled on home at some point but as you can see after the break, the interaction with Assistant on your phone is pretty visual instead of just blurting out a bunch of movie times.