you might think that there's not a lot going on with your Google Home devices
right now because there haven't been a lot of updates that have come out been
big feature pushes but there's a lot going on in the background right now
with the platform both Google Home and Google Assistant and I'm going to give
you all the insights here in our latest updates and new features for your Google
Home and of course your Nest products
hello Automators thanks for tuning in again now I want to give you a couple of
tips and tricks here and some new things that we're seeing on the smart display
specifically now you will notice down here at the bottom of the screen there
is some new information with your weather sitting down there and you'll
see the high and low for the day as well as a little icon for what's going on in
terms of weather in your area now one of the more recent updates and this is the
way I'm using the device is the ability for routines to be available on device
very quickly with just a couple of taps now you saw I pulled down and I went to
my routines and this is the way I'm actually navigating through YouTube so
I've just tapped on the let's get automated routine showing latest home
videos now you heard it it's showing the latest smart home videos and because we
don't have a real interface for navigating a service like YouTube what
I've done is I've created a routine that is something that I consistently want to
see on YouTube so smart home this is the newest smart home news or newest videos
on YouTube and my action is just show me new smart home videos on YouTube and
that's my entire routine but this allows me to go to smart displays and just have
that come up so I use that to follow different topics like Samsung
SmartThings or Google Home or Amazon's voice assistant and I just have
different routines to run through those things I think that's very powerful and
a good way to navigate YouTube one of the big things we've been waiting for is
the local home SDK and this is something that was announced by Google at i/o 2019
why is this so important well it'll give us local home control direct control
through our Google Home devices without needing
these cloud services to be online now currently Google is working with a few
partner companies I'm actually going to read this list Phillips GE Wemo LifX
and TP-Link are working with on their new released SDK so we've talked
about that in the past but they are actually working with those companies so
those are probably the first devices we're going to see with this local home
control there are a number of new UI and different updates coming in to Google
Assistant that we're going to see come in to the smart displays over time the
first one is a really compressed UI on Android devices so what I'm talking
about there is when you use the wake word bring up the Google Assistant it's
really heavily been compressed and you also find the cards that it's displaying
have been compressed further and further to give you more information in a
smaller space and not take up your whole screen you'll also find messages now
with the assistant actions capability so there's a few actions where you can send
to friends right away films restaurants whether the new newer
ambient modes that are coming out include things like the pre-made
routines of good morning good evening you'll also find an agenda section
coming up here where you'll be able to see your scheduled events and of course
your reminders as well on top of that all of this is likely to be modified by
whether or not your device is charging there seems to be a couple of modes
coming for charging with ambient display so lots of options coming to these
phones and you can see how they're trying to turn the phones into another
whole smart display in your home so it's been kind of a frustrating month here in
terms of outages and really a couple of months but all of this is in preparation
for a couple of things first and foremost you know the nest apps and
we've seen the first actual pullback of nest apps out of an ecosystem so both
iOS watches and where OS option watches you will now see that the nest app is
basically telling you to uninstall it it's done for and so you know we won't
see this on smartphones and tablets immediately Google has
kind of made that clear but you will see that eventually now I think that's
becoming very clear on top of that they're obviously preparing for the
amalgamation of all of the nest service along with the nest hub max launch which
appears to be slated for sometime in August but what's interesting is by the
time they get this device out they may be ready here in countries like Canada
because they have now gone out and actually trademarked that name here or
protected that name in Canada if you're someone who's using home assistant and
you really like that platform there's lots of you out there well there is a
way coming to actually cast the control interface or a version of the control
interface here to your smart displays on Google Assistant this looks to be very
interesting it might trigger me to actually start looking at that platform
a little more seriously because then again you have another control interface
now I've also been doing some testing with Hubitat here in my home and one of
the things I kind of put out on Twitter there was the fact that I had been able
to get my Google Home devices to actually speak based on automation now
that was actually through habitat and this is very interesting capability
speaking of new control interfaces if you haven't been paying attention to the
smart display interface as well there's kind of a new approach here and and
people probably haven't noticed this but as you go into the view room section
here you will notice on the left here number one you can go through your
different rooms very quickly you can also scroll up and down and go to your
whole home here where they give you another option here to go through the
five or six things you get on the pull down menu but on top of that you can go
through your different rooms here and just get very quickly to some control
interfaces so I really like that opportunity here that Google is giving
us to control the whole smart home and they are continuing to improve that we
had Phil here on the channel he's from the UK we had him as one of our smart
home to her participants and he actually made the news himself here Google you
know haven't heard they're not going to
rename the Google Home products like Google Home Mini the Google Home and
the Google Home Max but they kind of put out a tweet that was a little wrong and
Phil actually ended up on the Android police website here for his comment
about what is the nest home max so Google is even a little bit confused
here but they will not be renaming those products to anything related to nest at
least not yet switching over to a bit on Chromecast actually you will find prime
video is available now on the Chromecast devices up on screen right now is how
you can get all the latest smart home news we also this week had updates from
Wyze on the channel so go ahead watch a couple of videos on that playlist and
you'll be totally caught up in the smart home industry and otherwise guys don't
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