Google Home and other Assistant-enabled smart speakers are great out of the box, but they’ve just been getting better and better lately. Today, it’s been discovered that Google Home has a few extra tricks hidden up its sleeve…
Spotted in Google’s support pages by Android Police, Home and other Assistant smart speakers now have a couple of new capabilities that will surely come in handy.
First of all, these speakers can now send Google searches to your smartphone through a voice command. This is done by using Google Assistant’s notifications option to send the data from Home to your phone.
There’s actually quite a bit of information that can be sent using this including calendar events, shopping lists, weather info, and more. There are some notable omissions, such as alarms and timers for example, but it’s pretty nice to see all of this functionality available. The full list is as follows:
After your Google Assistant responds to your initial query, say “Ok Google, send this to my phone.” You can send information on these features to your phone:
- Calendar information
- Shopping list
- Weather
- Sports standings and schedules
- Movies
- Lists
- Images and photos
- Translations
- Finance information
- News
Along with that, Google Home can now turn your TV off if it’s properly connected with a Chromecast device. Home has been able to cast and stop casting content to TVs since launch, even being able to turn them on via HDMI CEC, but as pretty as the backdrops are, you’ll eventually want to turn your TV fully off. Up until now Home hasn’t been able to do this, but now you can by simply asking.
This will all depend on your setup, but if you stick along the general line of “Turn off my TV” or “Power off the TV” and slight variations of that, you’re good to go. Do keep in mind, though, that if you have multiple Chromecast devices on your network you’ll be required to say the specific device’s name.
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