what's happening YouTube? Josh Teder here for 6 Months Later and we have a
bunch of new Google Assistant features to go over today.
Now during Google's October 4th event, Google not only announced some new
hardware with the Google Home Max and the Google Home Mini, which we just
recently put a review out of. If you haven't gotten a chance to see that
review, I'll make sure to put a link in the description or just click the
annotation in the video. Google also announced a lot of new Google Assistant
features at this event. These new features make using the Google Home
devices even easier to use and much more practica. First up, reminders. Now with
reminders, you can ask the Google Assistant on your phone as well as the
Google Assistant in your Google Home devices to remind you of things in two
basic ways. Now one of these ways it has worked before, and the second way is
a new way the Google Assistant can remind you of something. So the first way
reminders works is you can ask the Google Assistant to remind you where you
left something. For instance, you can ask Google to remind you that you left your
wallet in your bedroom or your keys on the kitchen counter. Now the second way
reminders works, and this is the newest way to do reminders with the Google
Assistant, is you can tell the Google Assistant to remind you on a specific
date at a specific time of something. Me: "Remind me tonight at 8 p.m. to do the laundry."
Google Home: "your reminder do the laundry for today at 8 p.m. is ready do you want to save it?"
Me: "yes" Google Home: "OK, reminder saved." So when it's time for the reminder on the Google
Home and Google Home Mini devices, a white dot will appear on the devices and then
the Google Assistant will actually announce that it has a reminder for a
specific person. Google Home: "I have a reminder for Josh." Me: "what's the reminder?"
Google Home: "hi Josh, you have one reminder: water the flowers for my Elon Musk shrine for today at
6:53 p.m. you can check for updates like these at any time by asking what's up."
Now if you have the Google Assistant app on
phone and this even works for iPhones of course as well, you'll actually get a
notification from the Google assistant when it's time for your reminder and if
you use either Gmail or Inbox by Gmail, which I do, in Inbox by Gmail your
reminders actually pinned in your inbox for you. So, the Google Assistant really
makes it hard to avoid these reminders. It's a really great implementation to
make sure that if you want to remind yourself of something, you're definitely
not going to forget that you have a reminder. Now if you decide not to do a
reminder at a particular time, that's OK. You can always ask Google what
reminders you have later on and if you want to delete a reminder, just ask
Google and it'll go down the list of reminders you have if you have multiple,
and you can just tell it which one you would like to delete. Now let's look at
another feature that Google announced at their October 4th event, and this
actually involves the assistant voice itself. Google for the first time
released a male version of the Google assistant. Google Home: "I'm working on some mind
tricks for Halloween, if you dare to try one just ask." So, if you'd like the male
version of the Google Assistant to either appear on your Google Home
devices or in your Google Assistant app on your phone, simply open up the Google
assistant app on your phone go to the settings, preferences, and then assistant
voice. Then you can try out the new male assistant voice. Now the next feature to
discuss involves calling. A few months ago Google made it possible to make
phone calls from your Google Home devices to basically any number in the
US Canada or Mexico. The only problem with that feature was, originally when
you tried to do this the number that people would see when you're calling
them would actually be like an unknown name, unknown number. So most of the time
people wouldn't actually pick up, even though it was you actually calling them
just through your Google Home. So during the October fourth event, Google actually
announced a fix to this where you can go into your Google assistant settings and
actually put in your own phone number which will display on the person's phone
your calling, so they'll see it's actually you that's
calling them. Having your phone number show up in outbound calls really makes this
feature worthwhile and it makes it a lot more useful. I've at least found in my
personal experience, people are actually picking up the phone now with before
they just automatically leave it to voicemail because they had no idea who
was calling them. Now another really useful feature that Google announced at
their October 4th event and it rolled out is being able to control your TV from
your chromecast. Now when I say control your TV, you've had the ability to play
YouTube videos through the Google Home device on your chromecast on your TV, but
now you actually have the ability to turn on the TV through the chromecast, or
turn it off. And this all works thanks to the magic of HDMI CEC. Me: "turn on the TV."
Me:"play google homes six months later review on YouTube on chromecast TV."
Google Home: "Sure, playing google home six months later review on YouTube on chromecast from
YouTube on TV." Me in video on tv: "OK Google, showtime...damnit" Now not only will your Google Home and
Google Assistant devices turn on or turn off your TV, but when you're playing
music through the TV here through a speaker group, the Google Home will
actually lower the volume of the speaker group when you're asking it a question.
So if you use the trigger word, which I won't say because I don't want
triggering any of your devices, if you see the trigger word ask Google for a
specific query it'll actually lower the volume of music or podcasts playing, so
that you can actually hear Google's response, which before if you tried to
hear Google's response while you were trying to play music or podcasts but
also ask it a question, it was kind of difficult to hear sometimes and you'd
actually just have to tell Google to stop playing it and then ask it a
question. Now speaking of speaker groups, let's run
down a few features that you may not have known about they're not necessarily
new but that are pretty important when talking about speaker groups and cast
devices with your Google Home devices. So if you want to play the radio for
example on all of your cast devices you can via Tunein, which I just kind of
ran into I wanted to listen to a sports game on the radio instead of watching it,
and I just asked Google and sure enough it it worked really well.
So you can do that via tune in on your Google Home devices now another thing
you can do on cast devices now is of course play the news on all of your cast
devices, which I can't quite remember how long that's been supported for, I know it
wasn't originally but now you can. Except you still can't do podcasts on speaker
groups which drives me crazy take this example: if you ask the Google Home to
play the NPR news summary, it will tell you
Google Home: "Sorry, playing podcasts on cast devices is not yet supported." However, if you tell that
same Google Home device to play the news on the speaker
group, it'll do it. And if you've selected the NPR news summary as part of your
news rundown, it'll play it on the speaker group. Me: "play the news on all speakers."
Google Home: "Here's the latest news, from NPR news summary at 7:00 p.m. today."
It just drives me crazy that we can't play podcasts yet, I know this feature has got
to be eminent it's got to be coming if we can play news on speaker groups, but I
am just...please Google enable this feature for us all it would make life so
much easier to be able to just walk around my house and listen to a podcast.
I mean I could already do with music can already do it with the news but still
can't deal with podcasts...sigh. So the next feature I want to talk about is
sleep timers now I know there's some very passionate fans out there who have
been clamoring for a sleep timer on their Google Home devices. Well I'm happy
to tell you that you can now set a sleep timer with your Google Home devices
through the Google Assistant. All you have to do is have some media playing
whether that be a podcast music etc and then tell Google to set a sleep timer
and you can tell it how many minutes you want your media to continue playing
before Google will shut it off. Me: "Set a sleep timer for 25 minutes."
Google Home: "Kitchen Home will stop playing in 25 minutes." Now unfortunately the sleep timer is a bit
abrupt. I was trying it out with music and the
music just stops. I kind of wish Google would do a little fade-out or something
to make that transition a bit more smooth and less abrupt, but it still gets
the job done. Now let's say you want to do a sleep timer and you want to fall
asleep to something other than music or podcasts my suggestion for that would be
just tell Google to play sounds of an ocean or sounds of a rain forest and
then tell it to set a sleep timer. Me: "play sounds of the ocean.
Google Home: "this is the sound of the ocean."
Now the last thing I'll mention about sleep timers is you need to have media playing
first before you can set a sleep timer. If you try to set a sleep timer and there's
no media playing currently, Google is just not going to allow you to do it.
Alright now I know what you're thinking, this video has gone on long enough that
you're starting to see my 5 o'clock shadow well no that's actually what's is
not happening turns out right before I was going to publish this video last
week Google actually enabled one of the last features that they talked about at
the October 4th event which is the broadcast feature. So I wanted to go
ahead and include this feature in the video because it's one of my favorite
new Google Home features that they've put out, and I think it's just really fun
to talk about. So how does the broadcast feature actually work? Well it works
either on your Google Home or on the Google Assistant on your phone and you
basically say the word broadcast and then the rest of your message and it
will broadcast that message, typically a recording of your voice across all of
your Google Home devices. Me: "broadcast hey mom don't forget to feed the Pets while
I'm on vacation." Google Home: "ok broadcasting now...hey mom don't forget to feed the pets
while I'm on vacation." Now on your phone you actually have two options for
broadcasting, if you just use your voice and tell the Google Assistant to broadcast
something it's going to actually record you saying your message. However, if you
type the word broadcast and then type out your message in the Google assistant
app it will then broadcast the message with the Google Assistant's voice, which I
actually sometimes prefer because depending on where you are and the
microphone on your phone, it may not sound great a recording of your voice
being played across all of your Google Home devices, whereas using the assistant
voice actually will always sound pretty good.
Google Home: "Hey everyone, don't forget to feed the cat." Now the Google Home will also do
special actions based on trigger words that you say in your broadcast message.
So for example if you want to announce to everyone in your residence that it's
dinner time you just say broadcast hey everyone it's dinner time and what the
Google Homes will actually do is instead of just playing the recording of your
voice it'll actually bring a little dinner bell and the Google Assistant
voice will actually announce...Google Homes: "It's dinner time."
Another really cool situation that it also does the special sort of feature with is say you're coming home and you want to
announce to everyone, hey I'm on my way. So if you say broadcast hey everyone I'm
on my way Google actually played this weird sort of drumbeat and say...Google Homes: Hey there, Josh is on the way."
And that is all of the feature updates. Thank you all so much for watching this entire
video, if you made it through A+. If there's a feature we didn't talk
about, that we somehow missed, definitely let us know in the comments and I'll
make sure to put it in the next Google Home features update. Which at this rate
will probably be in the next two weeks because Google has just been putting out
so many new features recently but until then, thanks so much for watching.
I'm Josh Teder for 6 Months Later.