what's happening YouTube. Josh Teder here from 6 Months Later and today we
have a bunch of features to go over with the Google home devices first up syncing
devices with our smart homes being filled with more and more devices from
different companies they've also become more complex from rights to switches to
garage door openers and thermostats you can have a lot of different devices from
different companies in your home and Google has been working with a lot of
these companies over the past year to make sure that their products are
integrated within the Google ecosystem and according to Google as of January
2018 over 1,500 devices now work within the Google assistant ecosystem from 225
brands across the globe now when something goes wrong with one of your
smart devices let's say for example you just set up a bunch of new smart lights
it can be a pain to have to go into your smart device app settings and try to
reset the link between your lights and the Google assistant luckily Google has
a fix for this all you have to do is tell Google to sync my devices and then
what Google will do is automatically resync the link between the Google
assistant and all of the devices that you've linked up to it through the
settings in Eagle assistant app ok syncing devices for Philips you eye
devices and ecobee this is also really useful if you ever change the name of
one of your devices like for a smart switch or a light bulb and want to make
sure that the Google assistant is aware of the change you made
next stop pairing Bluetooth devices a few months ago Google made it easy to be
able to set up your google home devices as a Bluetooth speaker to do this simply
go into your speaker settings go to paired Bluetooth devices select enable
pairing mode and then go to your phone or other
devices Bluetooth settings and look for the Google home in your Bluetooth
settings you should be able to then pair your device to your Google home speaker
now let's take a look at storytime and games if you've ever wanted your google
home to read you a bedtime story well guess what you are in luck all you have
to do is simply tell Google storytime and it will read you a randomized fairy
tale or bedtime story all right here's Beauty and the Beast
from story nori on Google Play you see and the Beast now you can also be more
specific and ask Google to read you a specific bedtime story tell me the story
of Cinderella all right here's Cinderella from a story
on Google play Cinderella now this is a great feature if you have kids and
especially if you have a Google home device in your children's bedroom not
only can your children ask Google to read them a bedtime story but on top of
that you can actually put a sleep timer on it so your children can drift off to
sleep listening to a bedtime fairy tale you can also play games with the Google
home and quite a few of them are family friendly as well you can tell Google
let's play a game or play a Mickey Mouse adventure all right getting Mickey Mouse
adventure it's fine there are so many new games and activities to try out with
the Google home that'll be fun for the entire family now some of my personal
favorites include telling Google to play space trivia or just play trivia play
lucky trivia a game show yes hold on let me get all my stuff together
welcome you are you feeling lucky if you like trivia
you're in luck in the main trivia game the Google home will assign each player
a nickname and it can be quite humorous because it's just really random all
right I've got some warm-up questions for you easy stuff allo contestant one
I'd love to hear you say something and that something is rhubarb rhubarb
because you just said it from now on you shall be known as rhubarb next up night
mode ever wake up in the middle of the night ask Google a question only to be
startled by the blaring response you get or blinded by the bright LEDs
illuminating from the surface of your Google home device well this has
happened to you you're definitely going to want to enable night mode and if it
hasn't happened to you yet you're definitely going to want to enable mic
mode so what is night mode night mode allows you to reduce the volume of
responses from your Google home devices and decrease the brightness of the leds
during specified times with night mode you can set a volume limit for the
responses from your Google home devices as well as decrease the brightness of
the leds during specified times you can also enable the Do Not Disturb feature
which will block sounds from reminders broadcast messages and other
notifications on your Google home devices however alarms and timers will
still go off during night mode which brings me to my next feature setting
volume limits for alarms and timers you can set volume limits for alarms and
timers regardless of whether they go off during the night or during the day now
to do this simply go into one of your google home devices settings scroll down
to you see alarms and timers and then you will be able to set the max volume
for your alarms and timers Google also recently announced a new feature
specifically for the Google home many devices and this involves plane and
causing media so before you would only be able to play and pause media that was
playing by telling the Google home to just play or pause it you wouldn't
actually be able to touch the device and do that now Google originally designed
the Google home many with a touch sensitive part on the Google home many
right here but they disabled it shortly after launch because it was found that
this part was faulty and sometimes it could accidentally keep the assistant
recording what was going on in a room when it wasn't activated which obviously
was not good so what Google decided to do was to build in the play and pause
functionality onto the two side buttons here so let's say for example I was
listening to NPR I told the Google home to stop playing to resume NPR news
summary I can just press and hold over is keeping you inside here and there we
go we are listening to NPR if you want to pause it again
press and hold now this works both on this side and I'm genève on that side
immigration and that is play and pause functionality on the Google home Mini
next up start sound and end sound if you've ever wanted your google home
device to make a sound when it hears its trigger word and then another sound when
it started processing your request very similar to how the Google assistant and
Siri work on mobile devices well you can to enable this feature go into a google
home devices settings then look for accessibility and then select whether
you want either a sound at the start of a request at the end of a request or
both Google what's the weather in Austin Texas currently in Austin is 62 and
mostly cloudy the forecast tonight is 62 and mostly cloudy now the last feature I
wanted to go over today is one of the most useful things Google is put out in
the past several weeks and probably months and what this feature revolves
around is the issue a lot of people have with discovering what all their Google
home devices can do so if you've ever wanted to just browse through all of the
different things you can tell the Google assistant to do well now you can on the
web simply navigate to assistant google.com slash Explorer and browse
through all of the various things you can ask the Google assistant to do
whether it's travel shopping business and finance home control and much more
you'll get lost in the amount of things that your Google home devices can do for
you and that's why here at six months later we are continuing these feature
updates videos to make sure that you're on top of all of the latest features for
your Google home devices as well as some features you may have missed that we're
way down in the settings that no one is noticed before like some of the features
we went over in this video so if you like this video please make sure to LIKE
and subscribe to the channel to make sure you never miss out on another video
on the Google home devices until next time thanks so much for watching
I'm Josh Teder for 6 Months Later.