Google Home Stories Yesterday
A fairly common complaint with Smart Displays and Home speakers is how the Google Assistant voice is tied to the standard media volume. This can result in search results and responses being too loud or too quiet. Google is now readying a solution with “Custom TTS Volume” in the Home app.
Smart speakers are used in many households for controlling smart lighting products. Currently, one of the most popular smart lighting options, Philips Hue, can’t be connected to Google Assistant due to a bug, but thankfully, both companies are at least aware of the problem that takes away the ability for Google Home to control the smart lights.
Google Home Stories July 18
On July 16th, 1969, NASA successfully launched a mission to bring astronauts to the moon, and 50 years later, we’ve just passed the anniversary of that historic event. To celebrate, the US Navy has developed a new Google Assistant game called “Journey to the Moon” which plays real audio recordings and takes you through the process of the lunar launch.
Google Home Stories July 11
It emerged yesterday that Google hires people to transcribe Assistant queries from Home and other smart devices. The company today described the practice as “critical” to bringing Assistant to other languages, while promising an investigation into the leak of customer data.
A report from a Belgian network, VRT, has uncovered how Google is using human subcontractors to help transcribe and improve its Assistant speech-recognition systems around the globe and how this could be a privacy concern (via BoingBoing).
Google Home Stories July 10
Yesterday Amazon and Google finally put an end to their bitter, consumer-hostile feud and started to support each other’s platforms. Now, it’s been confirmed that on Google’s hardware, Amazon Prime Video is going all-out with full support for Google Home commands on Chromecast.
