Sure you may be asking Alexa for the weather every morning or using Google Home to play music, but there are features you may not know about that can make a big difference.
Maybe you are a veteran user of smart home assistants, or maybe you got your first for Christmas and aren’t sure how useful it can be. Whether you are tasking Amazon Alexa or Google Home to make your days smoother, no doubt there are aspects you’re missing. And some of the most useful features work on either one. Once you try these, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.
For a lot of people, looking at their phone is one of the first things they do when they wake up in the morning. It may be to check the weather, missed messages or news alerts that came in overnight. Use your smart home assistant to set up a routine to give you all that information with a simple voice cue or at a certain time. Common wake-up choices would be to hear your schedule for the day, the weather, headlines and your favorite playlist.
For Alexa, open the app, go to the menu and select Routines and +. Then tap ‘When this happens’ to decide the trigger for this routine. Tap ‘Add action’, decide what functions you want to enable and hit ‘Save’ to finish.
For Google Nest, open the Google Home app and tap Settings then More Settings. Select Assistant and tap Routines. Under ‘Ready-made’, choose the routine you want to use and tap the boxes next to the actions you want. For example, under “Hey Google, good morning,” you can get commute information, turn lights on and turn your phone off silent. You could then choose to hear news, music or a podcast.
You could also set routines for bedtime or use your location to set a routine for each time you arrive home. It takes a little more effort to set up location-based triggers, but it’s possible to have lights turn on, thermostat set to your preferred temperature and the perfect music playing right when you walk in the door from work. All thanks to your smart assistant.
Another helpful way to get double-duty out of your smart home assistants is to use them in place of an intercom system. No more yelling, “Dinner in 10 minutes,” or “Time to turn off video games and do homework.” You can now say it pleasantly in a normal voice and your smart assistant will do the rest. You’ll need to have devices in each of the rooms you want to contact.
For Alexa, say, “Alexa Announce.” Whatever you say next will be broadcast to every Alexa-enabled device in your home.
For Google Home, say, “OK, Google,” followed by one of these commands: “broadcast,” “announce,” “shout” or “tell everyone.” Whatever you say next will go out to all Google Home devices. You can broadcast a message from your phone or tablet when you aren’t home. Just open the Google Home app and press the Broadcast button. Google will record your message and send it to your Google Home devices.
Finally, if people are asleep in your home and loud responses from your smart assistant could be a disturbance, you can get them to reply more quietly. In Alexa’s case, you can even get it to whisper. If you ask Alexa a question in a whisper, it will whisper back the answer. Creepy? Kind of. Helpful? Yes, especially to parents of napping babies.
While Google Home devices can’t whisper, they do have Night Mode which lowers the volume. Tap on your device in the app and then tap the gear icon. Select Night Mode and enable it. Then schedule the days and times you’d like the speakers to be quieter. You can choose how low the volume will go during Night Mode.
If you have these devices in your home anyway, don’t only use them to find out the weather each morning. Take full advantage of even more that they have to offer by trying out these features.