if you use the Google Assistant to do certain actions
every day and you don't currently use Google Assistant routines
you're definitely missing outGoogle Assistant routines allow you to automate
a lot of Google Assistant actions you can group multiple actions together
and set them to go off at a specific time
on a certain day so let's dive into how to use the Google Assistant routines
and some of the best ways i've found to use them over the many months i've been
testing them now a word of warning based on where you live and what version
of the Google Assistant that you use some of the functionality i demo in this
video may not have rolled out to you just yet you can useGoogle Assistant
routines with both android and ios devices
as well as various Google Assistant speakers so what types of things would
you use Google Assistant routines for well i'd boil it down to two main
categories one grouping Google Assistant actions
together and then two scheduling those actions to occur on a
specific day or days at a specific time so first let's look
at how you can use routines to group Google Assistant actions
together when you open the google home app you'll see an icon for routines
on the main page tap that and then scroll down to see the ready-made Google
Assistant routines some of these routines are great for helping you with
your daily schedule take the good morning routine when you
tap it you'll see a couple of sections the when section is where you can tell
the Assistant when this routine should be triggered
for routines like the good morning routine
they start when you say a specific trigger phrase to your Google Assistant
to see and edit those trigger phrases tap the
line to edit the commands you'll see that by default the good
morning routine has trigger phrases like good morning
tell me about my day and i'm up but you can also add your own trigger phrases to
this routine such as morning sunshine etc moving back a page
the Assistant will section shows you all of the
potential actions that the Google Assistant can do
in this routine like take your phone off silent if you have an
android phone adjust the media volume of your Google Assistant devices
adjust lights plugs and more thermostat lighting scenes
tell you about the weather your commute today's calendar and your reminders and
then of course you have the option to add an Assistant
action like asking google for today's date or to ask about the latest news on
a specific topic like tesla or anything else you want the last part
of the routine is the and then play section this part of the routine will
tell the Google Assistant to play either music news radio podcasts in
audiobook or do nothing for music if you have a specific playlist on your
linked music service you can have the Google Assistant play
that playlist if you want to play news you can click on that gear icon to
customize the news sources that you want the Assistant to play from for radio you
can tell it which radio station to start playing from
for podcasts it can continue playing the last played podcast on google podcasts
or you can tell it to play the latest episode of a specific podcast
like new york times the daily the audiobook option will pick up where you
left off with your last audiobook in google play books now as
you can see i've customized my morning routine quite a bit to fulfill my needs
by adding custom actions and also changing the order in which
things occur alright well that's just one routine
that can help you throughout your day but there are several others that i want
to mention as well when you look at the ready-made routines
you'll see more routines like bedtime which is similar to the good morning
routine except with actions more focused on
helping you unwind as you get ready for bed so you'll see
options to put your android phone on silent tell you about tomorrow's weather
ask for what time an alarm should be set for lock your doors and arm your
security system adjust media timers adjust the
thermostat and the lights etc one cool thing that i really like
about the bedtime routine is that it can end by playing sleep sounds like sounds
of the ocean a thunderstorm rain white noise a fan
and more the sounds will automatically stop once you've fallen asleep
as well which is pretty legit other actions that can help you with your
daily routines are ones like i'm home which is great at having the
Assistant automatically turn on your smart lights
start some music turn up the thermostat tell you the news
etc leaving home can do the inverse i use it for the Assistant to turn off my
lights set the thermostat to away etc
now if you commute to and from work there's also a pre-made routine for that
as well like having the Assistant give you traffic updates to your destination
and you can also have the last action of this routine be to navigate to that
destination if you're triggering the routine from
your phone now so far we've only covered the pre-made routines in the google home
app but you can of course make your own routines
as well so to demonstrate this i'm going to go ahead and create a routine i've
been meaning to create which is one to help get me in the mood
to clean my home to do this we'll scroll up to the top of
the Google Assistant routines page and tap
add a routine in the when section of our new routine let's add some commands
first to trigger the routine we'll use let's clean
get cleaning and cleaning time as our phrases now notice that we do have an
option to set a time and a day for this routine but i'll come back to that later
on all right let's add our first action now when we tap to do that
notice that we have two options we can enter a command
or we can browse popular actions the popular actions are divided into several
categories like home control get info communication and do
note under communication because i'm demoing this on an android phone
i do have the option to use the google Assistant to send a text message to
someone and the last two sections are your
devices and custom responses custom responses are really fun because
you can basically get the google Assistant to say whatever you want
for my get cleaning routine i'm going to first use the custom response
action and that's because i want the Google Assistant to give me kind of a
saucy response clicking on the gear icon will allow us to type in what we want
the Google Assistant to say and in this case i want it to say oh
alright if you insist starting up my cleaning wizardry click
ok and then click add next let's have the Google Assistant
turn on all of the lights in my home and for the lights that can turn different
colors let's have it turn those lights to a
daylight color to do that let's go under home control and select
adjust lights plugs and more and then select the gear icon
to change your smart devices now if your home is like mine and you have
a ton of lights it's going to be easier to do this as a command
so let's move to the enter command section and we're going to add in there
turn on all lights next to make sure all of our philips hue smart lights are the
daylight color we're going to say turn all lights to
daylight next i want the Google Assistant to start the
roomba and have it clean all rooms to do this we'll add in the
command tell roomba to start cleaning lastly let's play some music to pump me
up for cleaning while the roomba vacuums i'm going to have it play my on repeat
playlist from spotify on all of josh's speakers which is a
group of speakers in my home now the reason i added the music action
with a custom phrase versus using the and then play section
is that i wanted the media to play on a specific group of speakers which
you can only do by adding a custom action oh alright if you insist
starting up my cleaning wizardry
all right so we've covered the pre-made routines as well as showing you
how to create your own routine from scratch now the last part of routines
that we need to cover is how to schedule a routine to occur on
a specific day at a specific time you can do this when you create a custom
routine but note this option isn't available in the ready-made
routines so for example let's look at the get cleaning routine
we just made say i was better about cleaning at the same
time each week we can set a time and a day for this
routine to occur and then choose a speaker that will
start this routine do note though this is now
optional if you don't select a speaker the routine will still go on as planned
you'll likely want to keep adjusting the actions within your routines over time
i found that when i first create a routine i'm
a little aspirational as to what i want the Assistant
to do for me and then six weeks will go by there's a part of routine that's just
kind of driving me crazy and i'll go back in
and i'll streamline the actions within that routine now we have barely
scratched the surface in terms of all of the potential situations you can
use Google Assistant routines for so here are a few more examples for
inspiration on how you could potentially use google
Assistant routines having a leaving work routine where the
Google Assistant will automatically text someone you're on your way home
tells you how long the commute will take and starts your daily drive playlist or
an outdoor walk routine that gives you the weather forecast for the next hour
starts your workout playlist and opens up the personal safety app on your pixel
which will automatically share your location with loved ones if you don't
check in after your walk or a routine that will
simply group all of your holiday decorations together
so when you tell the Google Assistant to turn on and off your Christmas lights
all of them will turn on and off in unison there are so many
things you can do with Google Assistant routines especially if you have a lot of
smart home devices as well as nest speakers google
Assistant devices etc now if you're interested in learning
more about either starting a smart home or
expanding your smart home you should check out a video we did on
that topic called how to start a smart home you can click on the card here in
this video or i'll also leave a link to it in the
video description below also if you want to learn more about the
Google Assistant we've put together a playlist of all of
the Google Assistant feature update videos we've done
it's a great way to learn even more about the Google Assistant as well as
stay up to date on the latest Google
Assistant features so make sure you check that out as well now
if you like this video and found it helpful
make sure you hit that thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel
to see more Google Assistant related and tech related videos
like this one. For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder,
thanks for watching.