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What's happening YouTube. Josh Teder here for six months later and welcome to
my holiday-themed set for a very special Google Home video. In this video, we'll be
taking a look at how to use your Google home devices during the holidays. Whether
it be turning on your Christmas lights, doing some holiday baking, playing
Christmas music, and even calling the big guy in the red suit up North, Santa Claus;
you'll find that you can do a lot with your Google Home devices during the
holidays. First, let's start off with lights. I love using my Google home
devices to turn on and off my Christmas lights. So how do you get your Google
Home devices to control all of your Christmas lights you may ask? Well the
answer is simply buy a bunch of smart switches. I found this is the easiest way
to make sure that all the lights you already have can be controllable by your
Google Home devices as well as the Google Assistant on your mobile phone.
Now I happen to have a couple of iDevices smart switches lying around that
I actually use all year round. I have my humidifier plugged in and a fan plugged
into it and they just released support for the Google Assistant a few months
back. So how did i hook up all of my Christmas lights to my Google Home
devices? Well it's really simple, all you do is take all of the Christmas lights
that you want plugged in to a single smart switch, plug them into that switch,
and then give that switch the name of the lights that are plugged into it. So,
for exampl,e the Christmas tree is plugged into a smart switch so you would
name that smart switch the Christmas tree and then when you ask Google to
turn on or turn off the Christmas tree, it'll just turn on and turn off the
actual Christmas tree. Now once you have all of your lights set up with your
smart switches,as well as you've named the smart switches in whatever Smart
Switch app you are using, the last step that I took to make sure when I tell
Google to turn on or turn off all Christmas lights. How I set that up was,
you go into the Google Assistant app. settings then click
home control, and then once in home control select all of the Christmas
lights that you want to turn on and turn off at one time when you ask Google to
turn on or turn off the Christmas lights. After selecting those lights, create a
custom room, and call that room "Christmas lights." Now every time you ask any one of
your Google home devices as well as the Google Assistant app on your phone, to
turn on or turn off the Christmas lights, it'll turn on and turn off all of your
Christmas lights no matter what physical room they are in whether they are inside
or outside. Next up let's talk baking with the Google Home. The Google Home
devices have a ton of functionality when it comes to guiding users through
recipes. So how does a Google home device guide you through a recipe? Well you can
do this two ways: you can simply ask the Google Assistant either on your Google
Home devices or on your mobile phone. Me: "Give me some gingerbread men recipes
Google Home: "Okay I've got a recipe called gingerbread men cookies from all recipes
this recipe serves 24 and takes about 4 hours and 30 minutes to make." Now the
second way to search for recipes and send them to the Google Home is to
either go to the Google assistant app on your mobile phone or to go on your
mobile web browser on either a mobile phone or tablet. This does not work for
desktop or laptop computers, and your mobile phone and tablet must be on the
same Wi-Fi network as the Google Home that you want to guide you through a
recipe that you're about to send to it. So go to Google on your mobile browser,
type in a recipe that you would like to send to your Google Home, for instance
you can search for a gingerbread men recipe, and then once Google returns the
results to you, you'll notice that a bunch of recipes have now appeared in
Google cards. You can flip through those cards until you find the recipe that you
want, and then there should be a button that says send to Google home. Click that,
and it'll send the recipe to your Google Home. Me: "Start my recipe." Google Home: "I've already got a
recipe called gingerbread men cookies from Allrecipes." Now I should mention
that this does not unfortunately work for all recipes. For example, not all of
the cards that are recipes on Google in your search results will have the button
send to Google Home. This function right now only works with recipes that are
from large sites like aAllrecipes or Betty Crocker. It's not gonna work for
some one-off blog that has a really good holiday recipe, unfortunately. Now once a
recipe has been sent to your Google Home device it's going to ask you: Google Home "I have a
recipe you got from McCormick called gingerbread men cookies is that the
right one?" Me: "yes." Google Home: "Great, would you like to prepare the ingredients or skip to the
instructions?" If you do preparation it is going to call out each item the recipe
calls for one by one. Google Home: "There are 11 ingredients I'll read them one by one.
Let me know when you're ready for the next ingredient. The first ingredient is
3 cups flour." Now once you're done with prep, or if you skip prep and went right
to the instructions, the Google Home is going to read out each step in the
recipe one by one. Google Home: "There are 17 steps. I'll read them one by one. When you're
ready to hear more, you can say next step. First step, mix flour ginger cinnamon
baking soda nutmeg and salt in large bowl." Now if you happen to miss what was
said, or missed a step, you can always ask the Google Home to repeat the step. And
that is baking with the Google Home. Now one thing I always get tired of every
year is I have a 80-plus song playlist on iTunes for all of my Christmas music
and sure, I rearrange that playlist every year but because there are only
about 80 songs on it, two weeks into the Christmas season I get kind of sick of
all of my Christmas songs. This is where a Google home device and a music
subscription, like a subscription to Google Play Music Unlimited or to
Spotify really come in handy, especially if you have multiple Google devices
around your house. You are never going to get bored with the Christmas music you
can play on your Google Home devices. You can have a Christmas playlist, you can
just ask it to play a specific artist's Christmas song, even if
you don't even know that artist plays Christmas songs. I for one didn't know Ed
Sheeran played Christmas music until I just asked google to play Ed Ssheeran
Christmas music it sure enough he sings a Christmas song. A lot of people during
the holidays seem to get in different moods of what holiday music they want to
listen to and the Google home will really tune your experience to what
requests you ask it for during the holiday season. So if you're in a mood
for more traditional music like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, or heck even
Michael Buble's style of music you can ask it to play those artists a lot, and then
when you just ask it to play Christmas music, a lot of times it's going to go to
that style of music. Now I haven't mentioned this before but Google a few
weeks back did make a UI change in the settings of each Google Home and Google
Home Mini devices settings. When you go into settings you can now adjust the
base of your Google Home or Google Home Mini device as well as the treble. Now
this probably is not going to make a whole lot of difference with the Google
Home Mini because they just don't sound that great compared to the Google Home.
If you really want to listen to music on a Google device, I implore you, get a
Google Home. It is just way better than a Mini. Now this feature is also going to
be paramount for when the Google Home Max is released which, if the reporting
out is correct, looks like will be released on December 11th of this year,
just in time to ship out before the Christmas holiday.
Me: "Hey Google, call the big." Google Home: "Biggie or biggie smalls died on..."
Me: "No, no Google, I meant Santa Claus. that big guy. Hey Google, call Santa Claus."
(phone dialing)
Elf: "Happy Holidays, North Pole switch board. Connecting you to Santa."
(holiday hold music)
Santa: "A phone call? Well, ho ho ho, hello there!"
So not only can you have conversations with Santa Claus with the Google Home ,but the Google Home
devices also have a built in Santa tracker. Now this is especially going to
come in handy during Christmas Eve when you want to track where Santa is at any
given minute. And if you've drank too much eggnog
trying to stay up late to catch a glimpse of the big guy, you can always
ask your Google Home device to tell you a Santa joke to keep you up and
entertained to try to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus.
Well that's all the time we have for now folks. If you know of a holiday feature
with the Google home devices that we didn't cover in this video, definitely
let us know in the comments below, and make sure you like this video and
subscribe to the channel to make sure you never miss out on another video on
Google Home devices as well as the Google Assistant. Thanks so much for
watching I hope you all have a Merry Christmas, a joyous holiday season, and a
Happy New Year. I'm Josh Teder for 6 Months Later.