Hey Google: let's get spooky
With Halloween only 10 days away it's time to get spooky and celebrate the
holiday with our trusty Google home devices in this video we're going to
take a look at a couple of different things you can do with your Google Home
devices for Halloween now before I go into some of these features I do want to
say that not all of the things I go over may work if you live outside of the US
and are using a Google Assistant other than the English language most of these
things should work but I haven't tested them outside of the US so I don't
actually know if they will or not so I just wanted to say that first now let's
get spooky you can tell the Google Home device to let's get spooky and it'll
play that track that you heard at the beginning of the video this is a great
way to create a nice Halloween ambiance for your residents now I do want to
point out that last year when you told your google home device to let's get
spooky not only would it play that track you heard at the beginning of this video
it would also put a Halloween themed video up if you have a chromecast TV as
well as turn your smart lights different colors unfortunately this year it
doesn't appear that the let's get spooky command does those extra things yet
Google may enable them as we get closer to Halloween I guess we'll just have to
wait and see on that but for now at least in my testing I've only been able
to get it to play the scary music next up the Google assistant can answer
a lot of different queries about the subject of Halloween you can ask it
things like are you celebrating Halloween I like Halloween it's the time
of year things get real spooky I celebrate by telling scary stories what
are you going to be for Halloween maybe I'll be a ghostly assistant
what should I wear for Halloween oh I can totally help with that hold on
killer costumes you get a tree do you get a treat everybody gets a treat thank
you have fun I need to help someone now Wow some strong competition this year
okay I need to do a quick pre costume interview
are you ready tell me a Halloween fact here's something interesting from the
web what are some interesting facts about Halloween on the website factor
tree for calm they say the first jack-o'-lanterns were actually made from
turnips Halloween is the second highest-grossing commercial holiday
after Christmas now if you want the Google assistant to give you a little
scared during the Halloween season there ways to do that as well
you can ask Google things like do you know any scary stories have you heard
the urban legend about the power cord that was too short about ten years ago
there was this guy I think his name was Henry anyway
he bought an alarm clock to put on his nightstand but when he tried to plug it
in it was just too short
I hope that one doesn't give you nightmares or you can say other things
like what noise does a werewolf make
this is a werewolf now aside from let's get spooky and being able to ask your
google assistant different queries about Halloween there are other things you can
use your Google home devices to do during the Halloween season one of the
largest things in my opinion that you can use these devices for is to control
all of your Halloween decorations now I do this with a combination of smart
lights as well as smart switches typically during Halloween people have
either outdoor decorations that they have to plug in or indoor decorations
like light-up jack-o'-lanterns etc that they need to plug in and with smart
switches in the Google assistant you can now plug all of these devices into smart
switches have them connect to the Google assistant and then is one of my favorite
features of the Google assistant routines and scheduled routines to be
able to have all of your Halloween decorations come on at a specific time
during the evening and then go off again late at night so let's go ahead and jump
into how exactly I do that for my own residence with smart routines and my
Halloween decorations so first thing you're going to want to do is open up
your Google home app and click settings now if you haven't opened up your Google
home app in a while you'll notice that the design is somewhat different and
settings is now much easier to find so once you're in settings go ahead and
scroll down and click more settings
then select assistant and then routines for my Halloween decor
I want all of my lights to turn on at 5 p.m. every day and I also want my
bedroom lights to change to blue to give my orange pumpkin light some contrast to
do this I can create a new routine by clicking the plus button the when I say
section allows you to enter what phrase you'd like to trigger the routine for
this one I'm going to type in turn on the Halloween lights
next I can choose what I want the routine to run I can choose a time as
well as select the days I want my routine to run as well as what Google
home speaker I want to trigger the routine
after that I moved to the Google assistant should section this is where I
type in exactly what I want my Google assistant to do I can have it turn
Josh's bedroom lights to blue and then turn Josh's bedroom lights to 50%
next I can add another action where I want the Google assistant to turn on the
pumpkin tower and turn on the pumpkin lights and turn on the pumpkin cube
light
after that my routine is set up and now I have a scheduled routine to turn all
of my Halloween decorations on at 5:00 p.m. every night all right well that
wraps it up for our Halloween features with the Google home devices thank you
so much for watching this video if you like this video please be sure to give
us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more Google home videos
like this one also if you found that there's a Google home Halloween feature
that I didn't mention in this video please be sure to let me know in the
comments below and if you'd like a written form of this
video in the form of a blog post be sure to check out our new website 6 - months
- later calm well thanks again so much for watching
I'm Josh Teder for 6 Months Later, have a Happy Halloween