Hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in again. We're going
to get started today by showing you how to automate your home for a vacation. Now
all of this is going to be based on having a Google Home in your home, and
then of course from there you're going to have to have some of these other
smart devices that I'm going to show you. For now, on an Android or an iPhone,
you go to the Google Home application, head down to more settings, and then go
into the routine section. Now from there what you're going to do is create a new
routine, and that's in the bottom right there. You can see the plus button. I'm
going to hit that and once inside of there, you do have to add a command here,
and what we're going to do first is automate our lights, essentially while
we're gone. So I'm calling it vacation lights on, and that command doesn't
really matter unless you want to use it verbally. Now what does matter is setting
a time end day and I'm choosing all the days of the week, and I'm going to choose
a time when I think it makes sense here. So I'm choosing to turn on my lights at
5:30 p.m., and then I'm going to choose my basement home speaker. That's just my
standard Google Home. You could choose a Google Home Mini if you wanted, and all of the lights
basically will turn on when I choose here, at 5:30 on all of these days.
Continuing on, I'm going to add an action here, and that action, I'm going to choose
from popular actions. What this gives you access to is all of the lights and
plugs and some other devices that you've set up in your Google Home before, in your
Google Home application, and you can see you can just click on each of them and
you can turn them on. You can also use scenes if you'd like, if you have
certain colored lights that you want to change to certain colors, that option can
be used instead of adjusting lights, plugs, and more here on the same screen.
Right here on this screen, you can see the adjust scene, so I could go into
there and I could choose any of these scenes that have been set up in my
Philips Hue, my Samsung SmartThings, my LifX bulbs, a number of different
services here. So for right now, I'm just going to leave this. I'm going to turn on
all those lights that you saw, and I'm going to scroll down and ask the Google
Home here to tell me about the weather. It doesn't really matter what I turn on
here, it's just going to kind of fill dead noise space in my home, and of
course that's always a good thing. So you can see that you could trigger multiple
of these events over the day while you were gone if you wanted to. Really the
point of this routine is to turn on my lights. So there we go, I've added all of
those different actions. If I wanted to I could add media, so that's radio or music
or other things, but we're going to do something a little different now. I'm
going to create a second routine that's actually going to turn off the lights,
and of course you could you could create multiple of these light routines at
different times with different sets of lights, and you could call them for
example vacation lights on one through ten if you wanted to. Again, I'm choosing
the day, the time, and we're just going to go back here, and now I'm going to add the
action, and I have to choose the popular actions again, choose my lights and plugs,
and here I'm going to turn them all off. Once I've done that again, we're going to
hit the add button at the top. I could add some of these other verbal functions
if I wanted to, but for now we're going to hit add. We're turning the vacation
lights off, and I'm saving that routine. So what I now have is my lights turning
on and off automatically every day at a certain time. Now I'm going to create
another routine here, and we're going to call it vacation speaker on. What I'm
going to do with this is basically fill my home with noise throughout the day. It
won't be anything crazy. I'm just going to actually add in radio noise in the
background so that if someone comes to my door, that's what they're hearing, or
if someone comes to my house that's what they're hearing. Again I'm choosing
the basement home speaker, but in this case, you could actually choose both of
your speakers in your home and you could choose to trigger them at
different times. So I'm going to click add media. I could choose music, but
ultimately I want this to play essentially for as long as I can, so I'm
going to choose radio, and I'm choosing a local radio station. It's that simple.
I have to hit add and then I'm back on this page and I could go ahead,
I could add actions again, I could turn on lights, if I wanted to, so we could do
this all at the same time, but I've decided to do my lights at a different
time here than turning on the radio and creating all this noise in my home, but
one thing I do want to do is adjust my media volume. So I do want to make sure
that every day it's at a volume that someone can hear if they come to the
home. So there, I've set it to 75 percent and then it will play the radio. I'm
going to save that routine, and we now have vacation speaker on, and you see I
named it one. So we're going to create a second one, and of course this is going
to be the speaker off, so I'm going to jump through this pretty quickly. Once
I've created that, I'm going to set the same time and days, and I'm not going to
add media. What I'm actually going to do is just type in a command, which is stop.
That's all you need to put in the command here. You don't need to say stop
music or anything else. It's just the term stop, and I could make it do other
actions again of course if I wanted to, but I'm just going to add this and then
I'm going to set the time and day. Now of course be careful that you choose the
right speaker to stop, make sure it matches the other one that you had
started earlier in the day, and all of this will work perfectly. So there you
have it. Now you have your lights turning on and off at a certain time, your radio
turning on and off at a certain time, and now we're moving on to something that's
a little deeper. Now I have a Harmony Hub in my home, so I already have a routine
called time for TV, and I can just say time for TV or TV time, and you can see
the command ask Harmony Hub to turn on the TV. Now Harmony comes with this as a
natural activity, but you can see I have a watch
TV activity already set up in Harmony Hub. If you don't have Harmony set up ,and you
need some help around that I do have a video on the channel that I'll put
top-right right now. Of course I have to set a time and day while I'm on
vacation, so you would do this the day you leave for vacation, and so I'm just
going to set a time period, and I'm going to set this later in the evening. In this
case, we're going to trigger this on at about 7:00 p.m. every day while I'm gone.
You choose the speaker, but it doesn't really matter which speaker
turns your TV on and off here. So now I've added true automation to a
routine I already had, which was called time for TV. Now I'm going to open up the
TV off, which you can see is ask Harmony to turn off the TV, and really all I have
to do here is again add the time that I want this to run, and just set that time
and day here, and I'm done with this routine. So by the end of this, I have
my TV running for a couple of hours every day and it's in the evening, and
that's along with all of these other things that I have. So my TV's turning on
at 7:00, it's turning off at 9:00, my lights are on at 5:30, and off at 11:30. I
also have my radio on at 8 a.m. in the morning and it's playing all day until 5
p.m.. So you can see there's a lot of activity going on in the house.
Now of course from there I wanted to give you a few more options if you have
some other devices in your house. So option one if you have a Samsung, Neato,
or iRobot vacuum, you can actually use IFTTT
and Google Home to schedule your vacuum to turn on. Now of course with most of
those you can create a schedule to turn that on as well, but the other option is
actually your gardening system. So there are a couple of systems here that
I'm going to show you are on IFTTT, and you can go ahead and
you can trigger those on and off. So let's go to IFTTT, you can
see the different sets of devices here. The Rachio is the one we're going to
focus on for today. You know we can see in IFTTT, there's a number of
triggers and actions, but ultimately we're looking to start a zone and so if
you have multiple zones, you can select which ones to start on which days, and
you can also stop the watering on the device. So what we can actually do here
on IFTTT is create an applet that you're able to trigger with your
Google Home through Google Home Routines. So what I'm going to do is
head up to the top right and choose new applet, and then I'm going to choose the
Google Assistant service, and then for this one, I'm just going to choose say a
simple phrase. And from there what I want to say is make it rain. So make it rain
is the statement that I say after my wake word with Google Home, and then
I'm going to choose the Rachio service. Now for the purposes of this demo, I
don't actually have one of those in my home, so what I'm going to do is create a
notification and then I'll show you the demo actually working here. So I'm just
going to send a notification from if this than that, and it will just say
we're making it rain. Now obviously I could create this and then a stopping
the rain applet, and therefore I would have both sides of the routine that you
just saw me make with my TV, my lights, and my radio. So here in Google Home, the
action I have to write is just what I wrote in if this than that. So I'm just
going to add that to a routine, and again you could schedule that however you
wanted. You could start different zones on different days, all of that can be
done here, so I think with all of that created, what I want to do for a demo is
show you just my phone actually receiving that notification. So I will
start the make it rain routine. "Make it rain." "Okay"
"Performing action."