Three ways to talk to MusicCast
From its first launch, MusicCast was perhaps the most versatile of the streaming multiroom platforms, given that all MusicCast products were capable of playing via the network using both DLNA and Apple’s AirPlay, in addition to direct streaming (in and out) via Bluetooth. The MusicCast app accesses all the major music services — Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, internet radio and so on — and allows rooms to be linked for group multiroom playback.
While the platform has been added to ever more devices, the abilities have also evolved. Yamaha was quick to add voice control from Amazon’s Alexa devices, and more recently has included a firmware update to Apple AirPlay 2 on those products which can support it, along with support for ‘Actions on Google’, enabling voice control via the Google Assistant. So that’s all three key voice control systems covered — Alexa, Siri via AirPlay 2, and Google Assistant.
The Google control goes beyond the usual Home/Assistant commands by using Actions on Google, which is the equivalent of ‘skills’ on Alexa, where more equipment-specific abilities can be invoked. The trade-off is an extra prefix lengthening your requests, as this requires you to say “Hey Google, ask MusicCast to…”
It also requires a bit of set-up: you need personal actions enabled for each Google Home device, then you must set up your own Yamaha Connect ID account set-up, link that to your Google account, confirm the actions for each Home device… but it took only about 15 minutes, and thereafter voice control worked as smoothly as we’ve had any voice control work. Our one complaint would be at Google’s excessive confirmation chat, so that if we said “Hey Google, ask MusicCast to turn it up in the bedroom”, this was actioned almost instantly, but the music or movie is interrupted by a redundant announcement: “Sure, let’s get MusicCast… volume up in Bedroom...”
But it’s worth using, and particularly handy if you have a preference for Google Assistant over Alexa. Google seems better at speech interpretation, and Actions for Google brings its abilities up to par with Alexa for platformspecific commands. You can control playback, request MusicCast Favourites, Playlists and Recents, power on and off (including all MusicCast rooms at once), change inputs, even link rooms for group playback, all using Google Assistant. There’s even a set of commands for that Disklavier ENSPIRE piano! We couldn’t achieve direct request of Spotify tracks this way; even with Spotify as your default music service in Google Home, there’s no way to nominate the nearest MusicCast device as your default playback device (only Chromecast products qualify for this). But once you’ve got something playing using the MusicCast app, the Google voice control is reliable and, extended sentence length and extravagant feedback aside, intuitive enough to be useful on a day-to-day basis.