Hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in again. I want to introduce you to some
ways to extend the functionality of your Google Home device. Now one of the best
ways I know to do that is through the application called If This Than That, (IFTTT) so
what I'm going to do today is show you 10 different applets or recipes, that's what we
call them on If This Than That, that will help you extend the functionality of
your Google Home. One of the biggest things that happens to myself and my
wife, that drives us insane, is we lose our cell phones, just you know,
for the time being, and then we want to go and locate them and normally,
one of us will ask the other to call. But if she's not around and I just can't
find mine, one of the things I like to do is just ask Google Home to find my phone.
What it will do is actually place a phone call through its phone call
service to my phone, and well, then I'll be able to hear it and find my phone.
The second thing I want to talk to you about, it's a little bit of a different thought
I think for those of you with a Google Home today, one of the things you can do
is log a list of notes, or things, any list type you want to do. So lots of
people use this sort of functionality for reminders and what you can do is
just log over the day a set of different reminders or a list or whatever you want
and then at the end of the day If This Then That will actually email that list
out to you. So it's a great way of tracking items throughout the day. One of
the ways I use this functionality was actually I could trigger the Google
Home to actually send me a list of times I had entered and exited my work
environment when I was on an hourly basis. Another great way to use your
Google Home that's a little bit outside what people normally do, is actually to
post to social media. Now I'm going to show you a few applets here that you can
use to post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and from there you could go and post out
to a number of other social media services if you'd like. Now what I use this for is a bit of
a business purpose. What I do here on the channel, is when I have sent out a new
video or when it's published, I allow some post to go to social media, but what
I also do later is I follow up with a second post simply by asking my Google
Home to post about my latest video. It will go compose that next
message. It'll be a very simple one. Just basically title, description or title and
link but it will send that out over social media for me. Now of course most
people want to know what Google home can control within their smart home and If
This Than That takes that functionality and it extends it a little bit. What
I mean by that is you can connect to some of the device types that you don't
have natively on the Google Home application. So this helps you connect to
those different makers of different smart home equipment that aren't
necessarily worked into the Google Assistant system just yet. The other
thing you can do, and I really like doing this because it takes kind of home
automation to that next level, is basically trigger flows in another system.
Or trigger execution in other systems, home automation systems, to turn
on different pieces of your smart home, or turn on, and turn off, at the same time.
So that's functionality I'll explain a little later in the video as well.
Something I think a lot of families are looking for is to manage the time that
their children are spending on the internet, or even themselves. Now Circle
is a great tool for that, but you don't always have access to your phone, or you
don't always want to have your phone right next to you to go and pause the
internet or turn on the internet. So you can actually use the Google Home and IFTTT
functionality to pause and un-pause the internet. You can also
use the numerical function of Google Home within IFTTT
to set a new time limit for your children. Another thing that I use
this for, and this is so I don't have to go specifically to the Fitbit application. I
actually log my weight by voice. now there's other things you can do from a
health-based perspective, and I think that's the point here. You can
manage some of your health type of applications through your Google Home.
Another thing you can do is log meals through the Jawbone UP series of
products, so what you do is you connect your Jawbone UP to IFTTT and
then there's an applet that I'm showing you right now, that you can actually use
to log your meal there. Continuing on, we've already talked a little bit about
controlling your smart home, but one of the hardest things to do is to control
your locks through say something like Samsung SmartThings by your voice.
This is a bit of a security feature but IFTTT allows us to get past
that little bit of functionality. Something that is still in development a
little bit from Google and IFTTT is the ability to work with
calendars. Now you can create your own calendar entries on both an iOS device
and on Google Calendar or an Android device ,and then you can use the
functionality of those two calendars to synchronize with the other. So you can
entirely manage your home calendar your work calendar through IFTTT
and the Google Home. the one piece of functionality I'll tell you you can't do
is remove an event or a reminder using your Google Home. And that again is a bit of a
security functionality piece that you can't bypass.
Something that will help you as you go forward and you use If This Then That
more and more is the ability to get an email whenever the Google Assistant
or Google Home publishes a new trigger or a new action on IFTTT.
Right now they're only on the trigger side, so this means you can
dictate to the Google Home, but you can't have it receive an action. So that's one
of the major limitations and I think we'll see that change going forward. Last
but not least, I talked about this a little bit earlier in the video, and it's
quite the trick. What you can actually do with IFTTT and the Google Home
is you can trigger a Stringify Flow. And so that means that you can actually
use the IFTTT functionality to trigger a Stringify flow. This is
extremely powerful, and the reason I'll say that it is is because Stringify has
a whole set of other devices, other applications, other things, that you can
connect to that Google Home can't. And even IFTTT can't, so you can
go ahead download Stringify, utilize that today, and you'll be able to trigger
those flows with your Google Home. So there you go I hope all of those tips
and tricks were pretty good here from IFTTT and Google Home. I've had some requests
about what kind of applets we can use with Google Home and IFTTT.
Hopefully this has helped you guys out, if it has of course there's a subscribe
button coming at the end of this video. Thanks everyone for watching, we'll see you next time.
you next time
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