Google Home can now accept multiple commands at once [Video]

Have you ever given Google Home a command and then immediately turned around to give it another? I do this on a pretty regular basis for things like controlling lights and playing media on Chromecast. Now, Google is making this easier by accepting multiple commands at once.

The way in which this functionality works is pretty simple, and also exactly what you’d expect. Simply start with a typical “Hey Google” wake word, followed by your first command. For this example, let’s say “turn on bedroom.” Immediately after that, without repeating the wake word, you can say another command such as “turn on fan.”

The final result of what you’d say in this case would be “Hey Google, turn on bedroom and turn on fan,” and the Assistant will cover both commands simultaneously, as you can see in the video below.

I’m glad Google has made this change as waiting for a command to finish and starting from scratch can often feel tedious, but there are some caveats right now. As Android Police points out, it doesn’t work on phones yet, which is a bit disappointing.

Further, it seems that Google is a little picky about which commands can be combined — I’ve yet to be able to combine home control and Chromecast commands and get it to work properly.  To me, that makes it seem like this is still in a very early rollout, but if you’ve got an Assistant speaker, be sure to try it out.