What's happening YouTube, I'm Josh Teder here for 6 Months Later and
today I'd like to talk about a few updates that the Google Home has
received since we did our six months review of the device, as well as go over
a couple of features I didn't mention in my original review for the Google Home
that I've also found to be quite useful and quite nifty and there features the
Google Home can do that aren't really talked about a lot. So the new features
include how the Google home controls music speaker groups as well as of
course making phone calls from the Google home that was the main update the
device has received over the past few months and then some of the features I'd
also like to talk about that I found are pretty nifty are one, custom responses
using the new shortcuts feature in the Google Home and then of course
translating phrases into different languages with the Google Home. So first,
let's go ahead and dive right into the music speaker group feature with the
Google Home. Now how this feature worked originally, was let's say you were
playing some music on a speaker group so for instance in my bedroom I have my
computer speakers hooked up with the bedroom Google Home. Now what would
happen is if you were playing music on "bedroom speakers" which is the name of
the speaker group, and then you ask the Google Home you said like okay Google,
play the latest Ed Sheeran song. What would happen is it would only play that
Ed Sheeran song on the Google Home device itself and it would not play it
among all of the other speakers in the speaker group. So you would have to tell
it to play the new Ed Sheeran song to the specific speaker group. So if you're
listening to music and you're constantly wanting it to play different things this
becomes very tedious because every time you wanted to play something new you had
to say the speaker group you wanted it to play to. So now Google finally fixed
this problem and I'm so happy they did now the way it works is let's say you're
playing a song on bedroom speakers and you tell Google, Ok Google play castle on
the hill by Ed Sheeran, I'm so sorry if you already have Google home I just
probably triggered your device it's it's hard to talk about it without
saying the trigger word I'll try to be better. So if you tell it to say you know
play Castle On The Hill what it'll do is it'll just play the song on the speaker
group you were already listening to music too, which is kind of how this
feature probably should have worked to begin with it makes so much sense and it's
very intuitive the way it works if you only want to play it on the Google Home
and you were just playing music on the speaker group just tell Google to play
the song on the Google Home and it will only play it on that device. Now another
really cool part of this feature is let's say you were listening to some
music for my example I was listening to some music of my bedroom on the speaker
group bedroom speakers, I go out into the kitchen make dinner and then I come back
it's been about an hour hour and a half and then I want to listen to some more
music, so I could say to Google I would ask it to play some Michael Bublé or
something like that. And what it would do is the Google Home
will now prompt you and say okay would you like to still listen to this on
bedroom speakers and then you can say yes and it'll continue playing music on
the speaker group that you last played music on. Now another great feature that
I've used the Google home for is creating custom responses for the Google
homes so I actually made a video on how to create custom responses for the
Google home you may have seen that if you've seen any of my other videos on my
channel and what that technique is using is IFTT as sort of the
middleware to combine the Google Home phrase with the response. Well thank you
so much to the viewer Keith Kie who commented on my six months later review
of the Google Home. Keith pointed out that Google actually had released a new
update to the Google Assistant with a new feature called shortcuts. What
shortcuts allow you to do is just like in the name, it allows you to do a
shortcut. So instead of telling Google to turn off all of your lights at night, you
can just tell Google goodnight and have it set so it will go ahead and turn off
all of your lights. So it's similar to functionality that third-party apps like
IFTT do. Right now an only supports doing one action, so it will
only turn off your lights it won't like turn off your lights and set your
thermostat down to a separate temperature but the really cool thing
about this feature is you can also use it for custom responses. I just did one
earlier right before shooting, Hey Google Westworld. "These violent delights have
violent ends." For the viewers who are fans of Westworld, hopefully you'll
enjoy that and for everyone else you'll know no idea
what the heck that Google Home was just talking about. Now another feature I've
been using a lot with the Google Home lately that I did not mention in my
previous review and didn't even know it really existed until I just tried it and
asked Google is translating phrases into different languages. So let's say for
example you're going to Mexico in the next couple of months and you want to
start practicing common phrases just to make sure you're getting your
pronunciation right or that you're actually just saying the right thing and
having the same you know structure in your sentence. So for instance, you can
ask Google how do I say where is the bathroom in Spanish. "Donde esta el baño" then they say I know
so then you can take that phrase that it replied, you can practice pronouncing it
in your head a couple times and then you can say okay Google Translate donde esta
el Bano. "where is the bathroom?" If it translates back what you want to say,
then you know okay I probably have this sort of right. Again, it's not going to be
a hundred percent accurate depending on which country you're going to which
dialect of the language you're dealing with, but if the Google Home can
understand what you're trying to say and it's saying okay this is what that
phrase means you're probably 80% of the way there. Now the languages that I've
noticed this works with so far I tested it in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,
German, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. So those are some languages I've
noticed it does work with to name a few there probably additional languages it
works with as well. Alright now the last feature I wanted to talk to you guys
about is calling from the Google Home. This is a major feature that Google
pushed out a few months and well I'd say it's enjoyable to use
it isn't quite ready for primetime yet, it's just not as simple as it sounds.
There are a couple of things Google needs to do with this feature to clean
it out before it's really going to become a killer feature which I think it
will be but at this point in the game it's it's just not. So, what does Google
need to do to fix this feature? Well first let me point out, you can only make
calls from the Google Home, you can't make calls to it. So when someone calls
your phone number, your Google home is not going to ring now this this is
something I suspect Google will fix, especially for Android users when you
have an Android integration with the Google Assistant all in your house, this
is something that probably should happen and I would suspect that Google will be
announcing this pretty soon. Now secondly another problem with this calling
feature is when you make a call from the Google Home, the person receiving that
call is going to see that the call is coming in from an unknown name, unknown
number or a private number and typically when that happens people don't pick up
and let it go to voicemail. So yeah, you can make calls from the
Google home but if no one knows that it's you calling them you're just gonna
hit a lot of voicemails, so it doesn't make that feature that great to use. Now
there is a workaround for this I just don't use this feature enough to I've
investigated in the workaround for my I've read it seemed a little cumbersome
and you know it's not as simple as just going into Google Home app typing in
your phone number and then Google just magically makes the thing work which is
apparently what they're going to do Google has says that they are going to
fix this in the coming months hopefully with an update out later this year. Now
one interesting thing about this calling feature is that it shows Google has
obviously designed the Google Home and specifically the color ring of the Google
Home knowing that more colors and patterns will be introduced over time to
represent new features. For example, when you use the calling feature of the
Google Home the ring of the Google Home lights up blue, which is something we've
never seen before on a Google Home device. This just really shows Google
thought way ahead when it designed the Google Home knowing that it is going to
be bringing a more features to Google Home customers
over time. Well that's all the major updates I had on the Google Home today.
Make sure to subscribe to the channel so you'll get notified the next time we
have a video on Google or their products. I can tell you we'll be having more
videos coming up very shortly because Google is rumored to announce a new
Google home product called the Google home Mini which will be priced at a
rumored $49 to compete with Amazon's echo dot and will be unveiled sometime
next month most likely during Google's October 4th event. So until then I'm Josh
Teder and thanks so much for watching another video from 6 Months Later