Once you unbox the thing, you have to get and install the Google Home app on your phone. Yes, it works on the iPhone too. On the app is where you’re going to set up Google Home and configure it. The process was simple, at least to set up one account for one person. You show it how to connect to your wi-fi, train it to recognize your voice, then you’re off and running. Since I bought two of these things, I set the other one up on a different floor.
I wasn’t satisfied leaving it at that, as there are two people living in our house, so I wanted to add Darlene to the device so it could also respond to her. I thought this would be a simple process, but it was not. I tried to follow some instructions from various sources online and got nowhere. One of the unfortunate things about a technology that is evolving very quickly, is that there’s a lot of documentation and articles out there that are already obsolete due to updates and changes to the user interface. So I had to call in the big guns and chat with Google support. I had already figured out that I needed to add my wife’s Google account to the device, but I couldn’t find the link to train the device to her voice. I guess I just didn’t wait long enough, because after I switched the app back to her account, I was offered to train the device to her voice.
Lesson learned: If more than one person is using Google Home, each person has to have their account linked to the device / app / service. Any changes that need to be made to that person’s interactions with Google Home require that that person’s account be selected while making those configuration changes, because of Voice Match.
The distinction between which features and commands require Voice Match and which ones don't makes sense overall. But it's baffling that certain actions aren't universal and applied to everyone. At least there wasn't any option to make them available to other validated users. For example, Shortcuts and linked Assistant apps should be easily transferable from one account to another, but for now you have to manually set them up for each user. That's kind of lame.
I confirmed that Google Home (GH) could understand our voice commands by asking “Hey Google, what’s my name?” If it recognizes your voice, it will tell you your name. I got my wife to do the same thing, and it worked. I have noticed that GH has more learning to do, as it didn’t always recognize me, but did respond when I spoke more clearly and slightly louder.
So I tried some rudimentary commands. “Hey Google, what’s the weather?” “Hey Google, tell me a joke.” I had heard that you could set a timer. I wanted to see how useful that was, because my wife is setting timers all the time, for laundry and baking and just helpful reminders of when things need to get done. I commanded “Hey Google, set a timer for laundry for 20 seconds.” I set it for a short period so that I could see the end result a lot sooner. I discovered that I could stop the timer alarm both with a voice command, or tapping the top of GH. But when I asked what the timer was for, it said that there were no timers set. So I tried it again and while the alarm bells were going off, I asked GH what the timer was for. It told me it was for the laundry. Brilliant. So the key was to ask before the timer expired. Then I tried to set a timer and see if it would go off on my second GH. It did not. I am unable to find a way to move a timer to another GH device. Most importantly though, is that you can set different timers just by naming them. So you could set a laundry timer for an hour, set a baking timer for 45 minutes, etc.
I had read that unlike the Amazon Echo, which has ‘skills’ that allow it to control other electronic home devices, GH has to ‘link’ to, or ‘partner’ with other devices. For example, I have a Logitech Harmony remote and hub that I use to operate my home theatre. I read that you can use GH to turn your cable TV or Blu-Ray or Apple TV on using the command “Hey Google, tell Harmony to turn on the TV.”, etc. But first, you have to link them together. That was a bit easier than I thought it would be. I tried giving it a ‘tell Harmony’ command prior to set up and it was smart enough to tell me this needed to be linked and in the GH app on my phone, offered a tile to begin the setup. Even nicer, as part of the process, it gave me a chance to give friendly names to the various ‘activities’ that Harmony could do, so that I could just say “Hey Google, tell Harmony to turn on Apple” rather than the longer, official name of ‘Apple TV 4’. Plus, if I took the time to program favourite channel names into Harmony, I could theoretically command “Hey Google, tell Harmony to switch to CBC”. But it did understand “switch to channel 6”. The only bad part of the Harmony to GH linking that went bad is that there is one last button you have to press on the phone to link the accounts and it’s off the bottom of the phone app screen, out of sight, so I kept missing it and wondering why nothing worked. Thank goodness that there was a step by step manual online, or I probably would have never figured it out. GH seems to forget the account link to Harmony sometimes and you have to link it again. Not cool.
The next thing I wanted to try was managing my Google shopping list. Prior to GH, I had been using the Google shopping list on my phone with great results. I was looking forward to adding things to the list at home by voice command, and hopefully my wife’s voice too. The first time I tried it, it claimed that there was no shopping list, which is obviously wrong. There was a deeper problem, which took a while to figure out. Somehow, Google got confused as to who was training their voice each time. This resulted in Google thinking my voice was Darlene and her voice was me. So when I asked it to add things to the ‘shopping list’, it did, but to hers, not to mine. This is the crux of the Google Home setup. When you’re training your voice, you need to be sure that the app has YOU logged in, not another person. It doesn’t switch on its own until the voices are trained and recognized. Once we realized what was wrong, we re-trained GH to recognize our actual voices. To do the final fix on the shopping list configuration, I had to log in to the app as me, and share my shopping list with Darlene. Then I had to log in to the app as Darlene, and make my list her ‘primary list’. After all that - it works. She can now say “Hey Google, add eggs to the list” and eggs gets added to my shopping list. Apparently GH doesn’t let you delete items from a shopping list. But you can ask it to read to you what’s currently on the list.
I discovered that although GH can speak in different voices, changing voices is not even listed as a feature in the settings if you’re not set to the language English US. So, you can supposedly change the voice by changing the language to English US, then change the voice, then change the language back to English Canadian (or whatever you originally had). But come on!
In another example of the lack of consistency in GH apps, I was reading a site talking about various apps you can add that make GH more functional. One of those apps was called ‘Calgary Bus’. Do you think I could find it following Google’s instructions? Nope. In fact, the app interface doesn’t match the most easily found instructions set online and within Google Assistant (GA) I could not explore beyond music apps. I don’t know if this has anything to do with being in Canada, but I don’t think so. I may have to call in the Google support gurus for this one too.
I had heard that a recent feature added to GH was the ability to broadcast announcements to all the GH in your home. Supposedly you can say things like “Broadcast that supper is ready,” and it will chime on the other GHs and say "It's time for supper, come and get it." I need to try this. I’ve read that you can broadcast things like “It’s time to leave,” or movie time, TV time, bedtime, etc. You can even have it repeat a phrase. But it’s one way. You can’t use the separate GHs as an intercom system, yet. I’m hoping that becomes possible soon. It should be simple to implement. Also, broadcasting anything will do it on every GH you have.
GH can be used as a hands free phone. It works best if your contact list in your Google account is stocked with all of your favourite phone numbers. I primarily use my iPhone contact list, but I added a few important numbers into my Google contacts. You can also just tell it to call a particular phone number and it will. The first time you try to call someone on your contact list, you get a pop-up on Google Assistant on your phone asking permission to use the contacts list. You also need to make sure that ‘personal results’ is enabled on any device you want to be able to do things like “Call Mom.”
You can ask GH for directions to a particular address and then command it to send it to your phone. This actually works. BUT, you have to tap the notification to see the directions. It doesn’t send directly to Google Assistant app on the phone. Not very intuitive.
One thing I thought was cool had to do with news. I said “Hey Google, what are the top news stories on CBC?” It then proceeded to play (not speak) the web / mobile news summary from CBC News.
If you see one of your Google Home's white lights on, it means it wants your attention and has a reminder or warning for you. The first time I saw this in action I asked, “Hey Google, why is that light on?” and it told me that it was a visual notification of an outstanding reminder and said what the reminder was for. It also told me that from now on, just ask “What’s up?” to find out what the single white light is trying to notify you of. Probably a set reminder. I was suitably impressed that GH was able to explain to me what the deal was with the light.
If you tell Google what your favourite team is, you can then ask "how did my team do?" without having to specify the name each time.
You can ask Google Home to remember anything for you. This is a game changer as far as I’m concerned. Darlene has been saying for a few years now, “It would be great if there was a gadget that you could ask to remember stuff for you, like where you put a certain item you don’t use very often, things like that.” Well, now GH can do that. The first thing I asked it to remember was my 2nd granddaughter’s birthday, because we’ve been having trouble remembering it. I said, “Hey Google, remember that Hannah’s birthday is the 16th of August.” And then GH said it would remember that for me. The problem, again, is that it will only remember this fact for me. When my wife asked what Hannah’s birthday is, it couldn’t provide an answer.
There are some GH features that only exist in certain countries, sometimes only the US. Case in point is “Tell me something good.” In a world where the news outlets tend to focus on bad news, we can often get bombarded with negativity to the point where it has a lasting effect on us, or makes us just stop listening to the news. The “Tell me something good” feature only gives you examples of good things happening in the world. But it doesn’t work in Canada yet.
I’ve always been fascinated by web sites or phone apps that will play soothing recorded (or simulated) environmental sound effects to help you relax. GH can do this too. You can say things like “Hey Google, help me relax.” or “Play (river / beach / fireplace) sounds.”
Supposedly, GH can play 20 questions, it’s just not called 20 questions. It’s called Akinator. To get going, say, “Hey Google, start Akinator.” Akinator will guide you through how to play it. You think of a character, real or fictional, and then answer a series of yes-or-no questions until Akinator guesses who you’re thinking of. It’s fun.
You don’t have to settle for your normal name when your GH addresses you. You can be “Your Majesty” or “My Master” if you like. Just say, “Hey Google, change my name.” Home will respond with “Alright. What would you like to change it to?” Choose your new nickname and Home will confirm it. I didn’t bother with this one, but some of you might find it fun to do.
Other commands I thought were neat:
“Hey Google, what does a moose sound like?”
“Hey Google, how do you say thank you in Arabic?”
“Hey Google, find my phone”
“Hey Google, play lucky trivia.”
“Hey Google, play space trivia.”
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