Sorry, Alexa and Siri. These 5 Google Home features make me love you even more

At the battle for the supremacy of the smart home, a Google Home it has been seen as an underdog. After all, Apple’s rival HomePod devices are Siri-enabled gadgets full of Apple-style innovations. And with almost 70% market share, Amazon’s Echo devices with Alexa are very popular, consistently surpassing all other brands of smart speakers combined and connect to almost every other smart device on the planet. For a while, the Google Home ecosystem was stuck somewhere in the middle, until a deluge of updates in recent months started to move the dial.

When it comes to digital assistants, I use them all. Every day I trust Siri to handle my iPhone and Apple TV duties calmly, but until recently Alexa and Google Assistant were sharing smart household chores evenly across my home. Now, practically the only thing I still use an Amazon Echo for is playing music on much better speakers connected to Alexa’s audio port – a physical connection that no Google Home or Nest speaker has ever displayed.

Yes, Google Home and the Google Assistant have come a long way in such a short time. But don’t just take my word for it. Try my top five favorite Google Home tips and tricks that will make you wonder if smart home racing is still a competition.

Turn off timers and alarms at ‘Stop’ speed

One thing I still can’t get over is how strange is to summon the Google Assistant. “Hey, Google” and “OK, Google” just don’t speak as gracefully as “Alexa” or even “Hey, Siri”. Fortunately, the Google platform compensates for your clumsy trigger phrase, eliminating it completely when you are canceling the incessant ringing of a timer or alarm.

That’s right – the next time an alarm, stopwatch or other reminder rings on your Google Home, you will be out of breath if you shout “Hey, Google”. Just shout, “Stop!” and Google Home will obey. (You do not need shout out the word stop, especially if you have Google Assistant Increased wake-word sensitivity on the speaker, but it will certainly be more fun if you do this.) If you set kitchen timers or other reminders throughout the day as often as I do, you’ll never set an alarm again with another digital assistant.

Now, if only Google Home made it easier silence an alarm in a different room how you can easily do with Alexa …

Schedule tasks for the future

I eat at night. Very. In a zombie-like state between the waking world and sleep, I’m lucky if I remember to close the cereal box or put the milk back in the fridge, much less turn off the kitchen lights when I get back to bed. Or sometimes I will realize that I forgot to program my coffee machine the moment I’m fading into dreamland and I’m going to regret that there’s no way to program it using just my voice.

Get on Google Home with the most amazing solution to a problem that I never thought could be solved – scheduled tasks. Google Assistant can now schedule tasks for the future, so you give the command when it occurs, not just hope you remember when the time comes. Check out our guide for making the most of Google Home’s scheduled tasks here, but the essence of this is simply telling Google Home when you want it to take a specific action, like this:

• “Hey, Google, turn off the kitchen lights in 10 minutes.”
• “Ok Google, make coffee at 8 am”
• “Hey, Google, turn on the porch light for 30 minutes.”

Try this with Siri and he will say that it is not possible to schedule commands. Alexa will immediately do what you ask, instead of waiting. Be warned – this feature is addictive and fast.

Schedule a full day with Workday and Family Bell

Speaking of programming things, for Type A personalities out there … Every smart home assistant worth their digital salt has a way of creating personalized commands, often called routines. But Google recently introduced two giant scheduling tools that can adjust your schedule in ways that Alexa and Siri can’t get close to imitating.

Workday is designed to help you focus on tasks individually during your working hours: it will remind you to get up and stretch, take an afternoon coffee break or start wrapping things up at the end of the day. Family Bell is more geared towards organizing your entire team and alerting your family when it is time to, say, spend the next hour in arts and crafts or meet in the kitchen for lunch. We give step-by-step instructions for routine templates here (go to the second subsection of this linked article for details).

Move your music around the house on the spot

If smart speakers were judged on anything but their apps, Google Home would easily crush the competition. Its application interface is the simplest, the most intuitive to use and, let’s face it, the most beautiful to see of all. And it helps you do one of the most common smart household tasks with ease.

I’m talking about multiroom media controls. To begin, open the Google Home app and tap media button. From there, it’s pretty self-explanatory, but you can consult our detailed multiroom music tutorial here for tips and tricks to try the next time you want to create custom speaker groups in real time. Siri and Alexa allow you to play multiple sets of speakers around your home, but none offer controls that are easy to master.

Enjoy the brief mode of the Google Home Goldilocks zone

One of Alexa’s most beloved features is the “short mode” to reduce vibration‘which allows Amazon Echo devices to respond to certain commands with just one beep (instead of literally repeating the command for you). But even this popular environment is far from perfect. On the one hand, it is an all-or-nothing proposition. Either Alexa dings to confirm, or it hits your ear, with no real choice between the two. (Siri does not have a comparable resource, so he needs to be left out for this round.)

Google Home has its own brief mode, if you make some adjustments behind the scenes. This can be a little tricky at first, but it is well worth the effort.

Basically, a Google Home will recognize the commands with an audible signal, provided that: 1) the device you are talking to is grouped in the same room as the device or devices you want to control and 2) those other devices are identified as lights in the initial Google App. This means that you will have to lie a little bit if you want a Google Home to silently control, say, a heater or anything other than a light, identifying it as a “light” in the initial Google App.

I promise, it’s not as complicated as it looks. We have more complete instructions hereand, after overcoming the initial obstacle of setting it up correctly, the process will be smooth from then on. And, of course, if all you want to control is the lights, just set up the rooms as you normally would and Google Home will take care of the rest.

If Google continues to add features throughout 2021, like the Zoom calls, new home and away modes and compatibility with rival music services was added in 2020, maybe a year from now asking if Google Home is an underdog or a category winner will be as unnecessary as shouting “Hey Google” before shouting “Stop!”