Tag Archives: Google Home

Home for the holidays: tips from Google Home and Refinery29

Do you hear what I hear? It’s the sound of wrapping last minute-gifts and packing suitcases for those who are heading home for the holidays. There’s no place quite like home during this joyous, hectic time of year, and our friends at Refinery29 are recording daily podcasts—available exclusively via the Assistant on Google Home—until Christmas to help you through the holiday festivities at home.


You’ll need a Google Home, Google Home Mini or Google Home Max to listen to the podcast version, but you can also check out written posts on Refinery29.com. Here are a few of our favorite topics so far:

  • Five pieces of advice for when a family dinner turns stressful
  • Everything's better with cookies—grab a family member and try out some of these cookie recipes.
  • While the cookies are baking, gather everyone for a holiday movie (but we can’t help you with the inevitable fight over the best spot on the couch).
  • If you’re on the hook for gifts for family members, here are a few tips to help you save some cash.

Just say, “Hey Google, play Home for the Holidays by Refinery29” to tune in.

Home for the holidays: tips from Google Home and Refinery29

Do you hear what I hear? It’s the sound of wrapping last minute-gifts and packing suitcases for those who are heading home for the holidays. There’s no place quite like home during this joyous, hectic time of year, and our friends at Refinery29 are recording daily podcasts—available exclusively via the Assistant on Google Home—until Christmas to help you through the holiday festivities at home.


You’ll need a Google Home, Google Home Mini or Google Home Max to listen to the podcast version, but you can also check out written posts on Refinery29.com. Here are a few of our favorite topics so far:

  • Five pieces of advice for when a family dinner turns stressful
  • Everything's better with cookies—grab a family member and try out some of these cookie recipes.
  • While the cookies are baking, gather everyone for a holiday movie (but we can’t help you with the inevitable fight over the best spot on the couch).
  • If you’re on the hook for gifts for family members, here are a few tips to help you save some cash.

Just say, “Hey Google, play Home for the Holidays by Refinery29” to tune in.

Brains, beauty and beats: Google Home Max is here

Just in time for the holidays, Google Home Max is now available online from Best Buy, the Google Store, Verizon and Walmart. Max brings together the convenience of controlling your music with your voice, with premium, high quality audio.


Google Home Max sounds pretty amazing right out of the box because it’s our first speaker with Smart Sound. Powered by Google’s artificial intelligence (AI), Smart Sound means Max can automatically adapt itself based on where it's placed in the room. There’s no extra setup or testing required. Even if you move Max from one spot to another, it’ll continuously tune itself to the room, so your music will sound one step closer to the studio.

Google Home Max | Introducing Smart Sound

We thought through each detail to make sure that every audio-obsessed music-junkie you know will love Google Home Max. Here’s why:


  1. Built for premium sound: Google Home Max has two 4.5-inch high-excursion woofers that’ll deliver deep, powerful bass. And Max is loud…really loud. It’s 20 times more powerful than Google Home, so it will fill any room in your home with amazing audio.

  2. More music: Max allows you to use your voice to control popular services like Spotify Free and Premium, YouTube Music, Google Play Music or Pandora, and with Chromecast built in, you can cast from your phone from many more services. For all of your other music and devices, Max has support for both Bluetooth® and aux-in. Plug in your record player and dust off your vinyl.

  3. Your very own DJ: With the Google Assistant built in, Max is always ready to start your favorite song, pause or turn it up, all with just your voice. Can’t quite remember that name of that famous holiday favorite? Your Assistant can find it with just a few small details. Just ask, “Hey Google, play that song that goes, ‘Chestnuts roasting...’” Or too early for Christmas tunes? Just ask, “Ok Google, play ‘Discover Weekly’ from Spotify’” (for some playlists, you might need a subscription).

  4. Designed for your home: Google Home Max was designed to be versatile and seamlessly blend in with your home’s decor. You can stand it up vertically or place it horizontally to fit in your space. It’s available in two colors, Chalk and Charcoal, and was made with beautiful yet durable fabric, developed from scratch to allow your music to be heard without distortion.

  5. Turn it up: With Max’s integrated far-field microphones and speech recognition technology, it can hear you from across the room, even when your music is blasting.

  6. Multi-room: Group all of your Google Home devices through the Google Home app and get your favorite holiday playlist going in every room. You can even wirelessly pair two Maxes together for stereo sound.

  7. Control your smart home: Make premium sound the center of your smart home. Google Home Max works with more than 150 home automation brands and more than 1,000 devices—including Nest, Belkin Wemo and Philips Hue. Plus, Google Home Max can complete two tasks at once. If you have a compatible smart plug, try saying, “Hey Google, turn on the Christmas tree and play Jingle Bells.”


Check out Google Home Max in person at select Verizon retail locations and at the Made by Google pop-up stores in New York City and Los Angeles. This holiday season, Google Home Max is the perfect gift for music lovers on your holiday list. Or maybe it’s the perfect gift from you, to you. We won’t judge.

Get local help with your Google Assistant

No matter what questions you’re asking—whether about local traffic or a local business—your Google Assistant should be able to help. And starting today, it’s getting better at helping you, if you’re looking for nearby services like an electrician, plumber, house cleaner and more.

To get started, say “Ok Google, find me a plumber” to your Assistant on your Android phone, iPhone or voice activated speaker, like Google Home. The Assistant will then ask you a few follow up questions and you’ll get a list of some local options nearby.

local

In the U.S., this feature will start rolling out over the coming week, so help is just around the corner. In many cities the Google Assistant will suggest providers that have been prescreened by Google and companies like HomeAdvisor and Porch so you can feel confident they're ready to take on the job. And if you’re in a city that doesn’t have any available guaranteed or screened providers, you’ll still get an answer from the Assistant with other nearby results.

So start planning your next big project—whether it's fixing your garage door or painting your garage door—all with your Assistant by your side.

The new maker toolkit: IoT, AI and Google Cloud Platform

Voice interaction is everywhere these days—via phones, TVs, laptops and smart home devices that use technology like the Google Assistant. And with the availability of maker-friendly offerings like Google AIY’s Voice Kit, the maker community has been getting in on the action and adding voice to their Internet of Things (IoT) projects.

As avid makers ourselves, we wrote an open-source, maker-friendly tutorial to show developers how to piggyback on a Google Assistant-enabled device (Google Home, Pixel, Voice Kit, etc.) and add voice to their own projects. We also created an example application to help you connect your project with GCP-hosted web and mobile applications, or tap into sophisticated AI frameworks that can provide more natural conversational flow.

Let’s take a look at what this tutorial, and our example application, can help you do.

Particle Photon: the brains of the operation

The Photon microcontroller from Particle is an easy-to-use IoT prototyping board that comes with onboard Wi-Fi and USB support, and is compatible with the popular Arduino ecosystem. It’s also a great choice for internet-enabled projects: every Photon gets its own webhook in Particle Cloud, and Particle provides a host of additional integration options with its web-based IDE, JavaScript SDK and command-line interface. Most importantly for the maker community, Particle Photons are super affordable, starting at just $19.

voice-kit-gcp-particle

Connecting the Google Assistant and Photon: Actions on Google and Dialogflow

The Google Assistant (via Google Home, Pixel, Voice Kit, etc.) responds to your voice input, and the Photon (through Particle Cloud) reacts to your application’s requests (in this case, turning an LED on and off). But how do you tie the two together? Let’s take a look at all the moving parts:


  • Actions on Google is the developer platform for the Google Assistant. With Actions on Google, developers build apps to help answer specific queries and connect users to products and services. Users interact with apps for the Assistant through a conversational, natural-sounding back-and-forth exchange, and your Action passes those user requests on to your app.

  • Dialogflow (formerly API.AI) lets you build even more engaging voice and text-based conversational interfaces powered by AI, and sends out request data via a webhook.

  • A server (or service) running Node.js handles the resulting user queries.


Along with some sample applications, our guide includes a Dialogflow agent, which lets you parse queries and route actions back to users (by voice and/or text) or to other applications. Dialogflow provides a variety of interface options, from an easy-to-use web-based GUI to a robust Node.js-powered SDK for interacting with both your queries and the outside world. In addition, its powerful machine learning tools add intelligence and natural language processing. Your applications can learn queries and intents over time, exposing even more powerful options for making and providing better results along the way. (The recently announced Dialogflow Enterprise Edition offers greater flexibility and support to meet the needs of large-scale businesses.)


Backend infrastructure: GCP

It’s a no-brainer to build your IoT apps on a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) backend, as you can use a single Google account to sign into your voice device, create Actions on Google apps and Dialogflow agents, and host the web services. To help get you up and running, we developed two sample web applications based on different GCP technologies that you can use as inspiration when creating a voice-powered IoT app:


  • Cloud Functions for Firebase. If your goal is quick deployment and iteration, Cloud Functions for Firebase is a simple, low-cost and powerful option—even if you don’t have much server-side development experience. It integrates quickly and easily with the other tools used here. Dialogflow, for example, now allows you to drop Cloud Functions for Firebase code directly into its graphical user interface.

  • App Engine. For those of you with more development experience and/or curiosity, App Engine is just as easy to deploy and scale, but includes more options for integrations with your other applications, additional programming language/framework choices, and a host of third-party add-ons. App Engine is a great choice if you already have a Node.js application to which you want to add voice actions, you want to tie into more of Google’s machine learning services, or you want to get deeper into device connection and management.


Next steps

As makers, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with these new tools like IoT, AI and cloud. Check out our full tutorials, and grab the code on Github. With these examples to build from, we hope we’ve made it easier for you to add voice powers to your maker project. For some extra inspiration, check out what other makers have built with AIY Voice Kit. And for even more ways to add machine learning to your maker project, check out the AIY Vision Kit, which just went on pre-sale today.

We can’t wait to see what you build!

The new maker toolkit: IoT, AI and Google Cloud Platform

Voice interaction is everywhere these days—via phones, TVs, laptops and smart home devices that use technology like the Google Assistant. And with the availability of maker-friendly offerings like Google AIY’s Voice Kit, the maker community has been getting in on the action and adding voice to their Internet of Things (IoT) projects.

As avid makers ourselves, we wrote an open-source, maker-friendly tutorial to show developers how to piggyback on a Google Assistant-enabled device (Google Home, Pixel, Voice Kit, etc.) and add voice to their own projects. We also created an example application to help you connect your project with GCP-hosted web and mobile applications, or tap into sophisticated AI frameworks that can provide more natural conversational flow.

Let’s take a look at what this tutorial, and our example application, can help you do.

Particle Photon: the brains of the operation

The Photon microcontroller from Particle is an easy-to-use IoT prototyping board that comes with onboard Wi-Fi and USB support, and is compatible with the popular Arduino ecosystem. It’s also a great choice for internet-enabled projects: every Photon gets its own webhook in Particle Cloud, and Particle provides a host of additional integration options with its web-based IDE, JavaScript SDK and command-line interface. Most importantly for the maker community, Particle Photons are super affordable, starting at just $19.

voice-kit-gcp-particle

Connecting the Google Assistant and Photon: Actions on Google and Dialogflow

The Google Assistant (via Google Home, Pixel, Voice Kit, etc.) responds to your voice input, and the Photon (through Particle Cloud) reacts to your application’s requests (in this case, turning an LED on and off). But how do you tie the two together? Let’s take a look at all the moving parts:


  • Actions on Google is the developer platform for the Google Assistant. With Actions on Google, developers build apps to help answer specific queries and connect users to products and services. Users interact with apps for the Assistant through a conversational, natural-sounding back-and-forth exchange, and your Action passes those user requests on to your app.

  • Dialogflow (formerly API.AI) lets you build even more engaging voice and text-based conversational interfaces powered by AI, and sends out request data via a webhook.

  • A server (or service) running Node.js handles the resulting user queries.


Along with some sample applications, our guide includes a Dialogflow agent, which lets you parse queries and route actions back to users (by voice and/or text) or to other applications. Dialogflow provides a variety of interface options, from an easy-to-use web-based GUI to a robust Node.js-powered SDK for interacting with both your queries and the outside world. In addition, its powerful machine learning tools add intelligence and natural language processing. Your applications can learn queries and intents over time, exposing even more powerful options for making and providing better results along the way. (The recently announced Dialogflow Enterprise Edition offers greater flexibility and support to meet the needs of large-scale businesses.)


Backend infrastructure: GCP

It’s a no-brainer to build your IoT apps on a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) backend, as you can use a single Google account to sign into your voice device, create Actions on Google apps and Dialogflow agents, and host the web services. To help get you up and running, we developed two sample web applications based on different GCP technologies that you can use as inspiration when creating a voice-powered IoT app:


  • Cloud Functions for Firebase. If your goal is quick deployment and iteration, Cloud Functions for Firebase is a simple, low-cost and powerful option—even if you don’t have much server-side development experience. It integrates quickly and easily with the other tools used here. Dialogflow, for example, now allows you to drop Cloud Functions for Firebase code directly into its graphical user interface.

  • App Engine. For those of you with more development experience and/or curiosity, App Engine is just as easy to deploy and scale, but includes more options for integrations with your other applications, additional programming language/framework choices, and a host of third-party add-ons. App Engine is a great choice if you already have a Node.js application to which you want to add voice actions, you want to tie into more of Google’s machine learning services, or you want to get deeper into device connection and management.


Next steps

As makers, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with these new tools like IoT, AI and cloud. Check out our full tutorials, and grab the code on Github. With these examples to build from, we hope we’ve made it easier for you to add voice powers to your maker project. For some extra inspiration, check out what other makers have built with AIY Voice Kit. And for even more ways to add machine learning to your maker project, check out the AIY Vision Kit, which just went on pre-sale today.

We can’t wait to see what you build!

Source: Google Cloud


Scoring a touchdown with Google Home Mini

Hey Google, who is Tony Romo?

… I’m kidding! But if you do ask, Google will tell you that I'm a former quarterback who played my entire 14-year career in Dallas. When you're used to playing at the top of your game, it takes a ton of practice. I used to have my team behind me every day, but now as a TV analyst, I’ve got a new companion to help me out—my Google Home Mini.

Being ready is especially important for the game this Thanksgiving. A big part of my new job is having enough stuff to say. Thankfully, Google Home Mini’s got me covered—the little device has helped me learn tons of new things. I already knew how to break down defensive coverages, but now I have a few new fun facts up my sleeve to keep it real.

This year is the return of the touchdown dance and my Google Home Mini keeps me on top of the hottest dances and plays new music when I need to practice my own moves. For what it's worth, I’m a pretty amazing dancer, even though my wife disagrees.

Alright, I’ve got to get back to prepping for the game. Thanks to my friends at Google for sponsoring a video (shot with Pixel 2!) that lets me show you all the ways my Google Home Mini helps me get ready. I’ll see you from the booth.

Google Home Mini | Hey Google, who is Tony Romo?

The Google Home app keeps getting better

Your Google Home and Chromecast are all set up and ready to go. Now, what to watch or listen to? The refreshed Google Home app makes it easier for you to find some of your favorite movies, shows and music. It’s not just a new look—we’ve added new smarts, too. Here are a few ways the updated Google Home app gives you a better browsing experience:


  1. Ready for our close-up: We’ve given the app a full makeover, and it’s much more intuitive. Key navigation buttons are now at the bottom, closer to your fingers.

  2. Browse your faves: You’ll see recommended content from all your streaming services—making it easy to find the movies, music and shows you want to watch and jump directly into your favorite streaming services to play them.

  3. Better search: When you want to watch that one rom-com but can’t remember the name of it, you can search by actor, artist, genre or category.

  4. Movie trailers: Android users can now cast movie trailers for everyone to watch on TV, while still using their phone to seamlessly swipe and play trailers for related content.

  5. More control: Have more say over your entire viewing and listening experience with redesigned controllers. You can even adjust advanced sound settings like bass and treble on your Google Assistant supported speakers, like Google Home.

home app controller

Update your app today!

Communicate around the house with the Google Assistant

From dinner bells to shouting, attempting to gather the family from around the house is nothing new. And now, your Google Assistant is getting in on the game.

Starting today, you can broadcast your voice from your Assistant on your phone or voice-activated speaker, like Google Home. So when you need to round up the family in the morning, just say “Ok Google, broadcast it’s time for school!” and your message will broadcast to all Assistant enabled speakers in your home. 

For certain everyday things like waking up, dinnertime or settling down for bed, the Assistant can also send a playful message on your behalf. Just say “Ok Google, broadcast it’s dinner time” and a dinner bell will ring on all your Google Homes. ?  Now you don't have to wear out your voice shouting up the stairs.

And if you’re just leaving the office, you can let your family know you’re coming with a simple “Ok Google, broadcast I’m on my way home!” to the Assistant on your phone, and it will broadcast to your Google Homes. To ensure that broadcasting works across all your devices, make sure you’re signed in with the same Google Account. See our help center to learn more.

Broadcasting starts rolling out today to the Assistant on phones and speakers set to English language in the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K., with more languages coming soon.

Travel through Hawkins with new “Stranger Things” game for Google Home

Do you have what it takes to be part of the Hawkins Middle School AV Club? Now you can find out with the new “Stranger Things” game, built exclusively for your Google Assistant on Google Home.

Starting today, you can go on an interactive journey with Dustin and the kids of “Stranger Things” to turn your Google Home experience Upside Down.

Google Home | Stranger Things Game Trailer

If you’re in the U.S., U.K., Canada or Australia, all you have to do is say, “Ok Google, talk to Dustin from Stranger Things” to start the game and transform your Google Home or Google Home Mini into a walkie talkie. Then, you’ll provide crucial direction to the show’s characters as they tackle adventures from Season 2.

“Stranger Things” is also one of millions of TV shows and movies that you can stream to your TV using your voice via Google Home and Chromecast. Start watching by saying, “Ok Google, play “Stranger Things” on Netflix” (you’ll need a Netflix subscription). You have our full permission to binge this weekend—just make sure your Google Home is close by.