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Guide to complete mastery of your new Google Home unit

Google Home goes on sale in retail locations across Canada today, so let’s talk about everything you’ll want to do after unboxing your new smart home assistant to absolutely maximize its capabilities.

Google Home is different from setting up a new smartphone, tablet, or laptop in that it doesn’t provide a visual interface. So you can’t explore the context menus and settings on the device in the same way you normally would with new hardware – you have to discover is capabilities through conversation. The app does a good job of helping that along, but we’re going to save you time by providing exactly what steps to take for a better-than-average setup. Including some things that Google isn’t telling you.

Google Home retails for $179.99. Unlike other hardware, there are advantages to buying it in multiples. The main one being a sound system that’s in sync throughout your home. Also, being able to speak commands to it in more than one area is useful. I use two in my condo – one placed in the bedroom, and one in kitchen / living room area.

Setting up for setup

Before we get started here’s what you’ll need to follow these setup instructions:

Ok, Google and reader. Let’s get started.

Tailor your content preferences

You’ll want to set up your preferred music service and queue up your daily news briefings.

Add your Spotify account

Choose your news briefings

Customize “my day”

Pro tip: Tap the three-dot icon in the top-right corner of the “My Day” window to see the log of your personal activity with Google Home. If you come across strange behaviour, this is the place to check and see what commands Google Home was following.

Set up your smart home devices

There’s a long list of connected light bulbs, switches, cameras, thermostats, etc. that you can connect to Google Home and control with your voice. To do so, you’ll connect the account you use to manage these devices to the Google Home app. This is done under Settings -> Home control -> the “+” button in the bottom-right corner. Some smart home brands require you to use a hub to control all the devices. I opted for TP-Link brand smart bulbs and switches for my lights, since no hub is required.

Name your devices and assign them to rooms

Connect your Ecobee to Google Home

Google Home offers native integration with Nest, of course, the smart thermostat in the Alphabet Inc. family. If you’re like me and you have an Ecobee thermostat, support for Google Home isn’t available at present. But there’s a workaround to access it through the Wink app.

Connect Chromecast devices and group them

Chromecast TV or audio devices If you use in your house and you’ve set them up on the same Wi-Fi network as Google Home, then your Google Home app should discover them automatically. You should see them in the “Devices” tab of the Google Home app which is accessed by tapping the icon in the top right corner of the main screen, or Settings -> Devices.

You can’t group Chromecast TV devices together, probably because people normally watch someone on one screen at a time. You can access any Youtube video natively through Google Home on your Chromecast device, or Netflix once you’ve connected your account, or you can see photos you have stored with Google Photos.

Connect your Netflix account

Train your Google Photos library for voice control

I find one of the more entertaining features of Google Home is to have it show you photos from your collection via a Chromecast TV. Thanks to the smart Assistant AI in Google Photos, you can ask to see all the photos in your collection of “cats” and the image recognition will work the magic. You can also call up photos based on album name, when and where they were taken, and even based on who you’re with. This experience can be a lot better if you take some time to train the Assistant to recognize your friends. (Here I will note that according to Google when you apply a name label to your collection of photos, that stays local to your account for privacy reasons. So you’re not training Google to recognize your friend’s faces everywhere it sees them on the wider Internet.)

The best IFTTT recipes for Google Home

For this section, I’ll be assuming that you’ve already created an IFTTT account and connected the required services to it. If you’re never tried IFTTT, don’t be intimidated, it’s a point-and-click service that lets us muggles (re: non-programmers) set up simple trigger and response systems. With the Google Assistant service, we can set it up as a trigger (in other words, the “if” part of the applet).

With the Google Assistant service, we can set it up as a trigger (in other words, the “if” part of the applet). But not the response (the “that” part of the applet.) So it can be used to control other connected services, but not as a way to push you information from those services. I’m sharing here my most useful applets that I’ve discovered so far. To do the same, create a new applet and select “Google Assistant” for the “If” part of the applet. Then follow the steps in sequence.

Schedule an event in Google Calendar

Find your phone

Write something down

Change your Ecobee comfort settings

Earlier in this tutorial, we covered how to control Ecobee through the Wink app. But that doesn’t allow you to change the comfort profile on your Ecobee with your voice. This will enable those features.

Access third-party services in Canada

At launch, Google says that most of the third-party services available in the U.S. won’t be accessible in Canada. To see some of these services, select “Assistant apps” from the Settings menu. Ask Google to “talk to” any of these and it will politely apologize and tell you that it’s not set up for devices set up on Canadian English.  That’s a big hint.

Change your Google Home language to U.S. English and it will give you access to those Assistant apps, including Uber. Try saying “talk to *service name*” or “ask *service name* X” to use these apps. Google says they’ll be available on Canadian English eventually.

One last resource I’ll leave you with is the /googlehome sub-Reddit. Check out the sticky posts at the top for even more in-depth integrations and elaborate Google Home setups. If you’re willing to set up a server and write some Python code, you’ll really push the boundaries of the Google Home experience.

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