Tag: Google Assistant

In the year since its release, there is little room for debate on the growth that Google Home and Google Assistant have seen.  The smart speaker has sold well and with brains behind it, Assistant, has continued to grow in abilities on what it can help you with in your day-to-day.  I’ve had a Google Home in my home office for nearly a year now and it is so integrated into my day that I can hardly see not having it around.

If there has been one challenge with Google Home, it has been the size.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not huge at just under 6″ tall, but it is noticeable if you have it in a bedroom or family room.   That is where the $50 Google Home Mini comes into the picture.  Standing only 1.65″ tall and covered in an elegant fabric, the Home Mini is designed to go into various rooms of your home and just be there unobtrusively.  It is designed to blend in but remain always available and provide excellent sound quality.  The Google Home Mini truly is for the masses because of all of this and a price point that is hard to resist.

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.

Yesterday during the Google product event, a new Find My Phone through Google Assistant was demonstrated.  Using Assistant on your Google Home, it can locate your phone by ringing it, even if it is in Do Not Disturb, so you can find it somewhere in your house.  The question during the demo was when the feature would roll out to everyone?

The answer is right now.

The Find My Phone feature has gone live and now you can simply go to your Google Home and say, “OK Google, find my phone”.  It will then identify the phone you are wanting to find (if you have multiple phones) and will then ask you if you want it to ring your phone at full volume.  So long as you have Find My Phone enabled on your account and Android phone, the feature works – and well.

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.

Whether it was intentional or not, Google has all-but confirmed that Google Assistant will be coming to Chrome OS in the near future.  In the latest update for Google Home for Android, the Chat with Google Assistant section of the app (in the Explore portion of the app) clearly indicates Chromebooks as an option for Assistant.  You can see a screenshot of it after the break.

Seeing this is not entirely unexpected.  Google has been rumored to be bringing their AI driving Assistant to Chrome OS and with the Pixel event later this week, where the Pixel Book is expected to be announced as a premium Chromebook offering.  Other teardowns of Chrome OS and the Google Home app have also pointed to code that suggests Google Assistant is going to coming to Chrome OS.  In other words, there is a 99% chance this is accurate.

In a Business Insider report that was published today, Microsoft Cortana only trails Google Assistant in overall answer accuracy as well as the number of questions asked.  In fact, Assistant and Cortana were well ahead of Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa in both categories.

The report focused on the news from earlier this week that Apple is replacing Bing as the default search engine for Siri in MacOS High Sierra and iOS 11 and points out that the move, which will have Siri leverage Google Search APIs, will likely dramatically help Apple’s assistant in its use and accuracy.