Google Home: Your essential starter
GOOGLE’S SMART SPEAKER COMES PACKED WITH FEATURES BUT GETTING THE BEST OUT OF IT TAKES SOME KNOWHOW.
GOOGLE HAS MADE its Home smart speaker easy enough for a child to use. However, there are a handful of functions and features you need to be aware of to ensure you get the best possible experience.
POSITIONING
There’s really no hard and fast rule about where you should place the Google Home in order to get the best sound quality. The internal audio components are arranged to deliver ‘360-degree’ audio, which means it should theoretically sound the same no matter where you put it.
That said, having one side of it close to a wall — about 7-10cm away — will enable the sound waves to bounce off the wall and amplify it.
You should also consider where the speaker will be used most often. While the dual microphones built into the Home are more sensitive than the single one in a smartphone, you’ll generally still need to be in the same room as the speaker for it to properly register your voice commands.
The kitchen or the living room are ideal locations, as these are central hubs of the home, but if you’re setting up more than one speaker, you could consider putting the additional ones in bedrooms or a study.
SETUP
To set the Google Home up for the first time, you’ll need to download the Google Home app, which is available for iOS and Android. This app takes you through the setup process step by step, but you’ll need to have a Google account beforehand. Frankly, we’d be surprised if you’ve managed to get this far in life without creating one, but if you’re one of these mythical creatures, you can finally join the rest of civilisation by going to tinyurl.com/
tla76-gsign. (Sorry, there’s no getting around it if you want to use the Google Home!)
From the Google Home app, you’ll be prompted to select the Google account you want to use with the smart speaker. If you have more than one account set up on your mobile device already, you’ll need to decide which one you’ll use for the Google Home.
Your best bet is using the account that you utilise the most for your own personal use. That’s because the Home will use all of the preferences, search history, music history and personal information (such as contacts, calendar and tasks) tied to that account — and the more it knows about you, the better it will be at handling any requests you throw at it.
It’s then a matter of running through the rest of the setup wizard screens, which
THE GOOGLE HOME IS BUILT FROM THE GROUND UP FOR VOICE INTERACTION. IT’S ALWAYS LISTENING AND WAITING FOR YOUR COMMANDS: SAYING ‘OK GOOGLE’ OR ‘HEY GOOGLE’ WILL WAKE IT UP.
are numerous, but thankfully only need to be completed the one time. You’ll need to have your Wi-Fi password handy to configure the Home to access the internet directly — with the good news being that once you’ve blessed it with this capability and have finished setting it up to your liking, the speaker can function quite independently.
You’ll also need to ‘train’ the speaker to recognise your voice using the ‘Voice Match’ function — make sure that the room is relatively quiet when you’re doing this to ensure an accurate reading.
CREATE MULTIPLE USER ACCOUNTS
One of the key advantages of the Google Home versus the other smart speakers on the market is that it supports multiple user accounts. This means that every member of the household can create their own profile with the Google Home that’s tied to the sound of their voice. If your partner asks Google Home what the next appointment on their calendar is, for instance, it’s smart enough to recognise their voice and serve up the information that’s tied to their Google account.
New users will need to install the Google Home app on their own device. Make sure they are also connected to the same Wi-Fi network, and they can go through the process of setting their account up in the app. After they select the Google Home speaker, they’ll see a blue ‘Link your account’ option. Once the speaker is linked, the new user will need to run through the voice assistant again to train it with their voice. At this point, the speaker will be able to differentiate between your voice and theirs.
VOICE COMMANDS
The Google Home is built from the ground up for voice interaction. It’s always listening and waiting for your commands: saying ‘OK Google’ or ‘Hey Google’ will wake it up, and from there, it’s simply a matter of talking to the Home in everyday English like you would a person. There’s no need to memorise specific voice commands using a set syntax — you can mix it up and talk to the Home naturally, which is what makes it so easy to use for younger and older generations.
Google separates the Home’s capabilities into: music, get answers, get stuff done, fun and more. The voice commands for music control include requesting a specific song, artist, album name and genre or mood, and you can also use your voice to shuffle, pause, stop, skip and adjust volume.
The Google Home will automatically play music from whichever music service you specified as the default during setup, but if you want to play a song from a different service, you’ll need to add the name of that service to the end of your voice command. If you wanted to use YouTube for instance, you’d say something like “Hey Google, play a song from Taylor Swift on YouTube’.
YouTube can be a useful fallback for some of your more esoteric music preferences, however you need to have a YouTube Red subscription to take advantage of that. If you’re a Google Play Music subscriber, YouTube Red is included for free.
USING THE HOME’S PHYSICAL CONTROLS
As good as the Google Home is at understanding voice commands, it can often be easier to simply reach out and physically handle the speaker — particularly when it comes to pausing/playing music and adjusting volume.
The top, flat part of the Google Home is actually a touch-sensitive panel. You can adjust the volume at any time, drawing a circle clockwise to increase the volume and anti-clockwise to decrease it. If a song is playing, tapping once on the top of the speaker will pause playback. If nothing is playing, then the same action will resume playback for the last played song.
The only physical button on the Home is for the microphone, which you can press once to mute — handy if you don’t want the speaker ‘eavesdropping’ on your conversations.
USE THE HOME AS A BLUETOOTH SPEAKER
If your music service of choice isn’t Play Music, YouTube or Spotify, you can still use the Home as a Bluetooth speaker for your smartphone, tablet or laptop. There are two ways to do this. The quick way is by voice: you can say ‘OK Google, Bluetooth pairing’, and the Home will become discoverable to all nearby Bluetooth devices for a few minutes. You can then pair it with your smartphone the way you would any other Bluetooth device.
The other way to do it is through the Google Home app. Tap the menu icon on the top left corner of the app, select Devices, tap the ‘…’ icon on the right-hand side of the speaker name, and select Settings. Scroll to the bottom and tap ‘Paired Bluetooth devices’. Finally, tap ‘Enable pairing mode’ to make the Home discoverable to other devices.
ADDITIONAL SETTINGS
While you’re in the Home’s settings, it’s worth exploring the other things you can tweak. Press the arrow back from the ‘Paired Bluetooth devices’ screen to go back to the main settings, and you’ll see a number of advanced options.
Audiophiles will appreciate the equaliser settings, which let you manually tweak the bass and treble levels, while those who use the Home in the bedroom will make good use of the ‘Night mode’, which reduces the volume of the Home’s responses and adjusts the brightness of the top-mounted LED at night.
GUEST MODE
Another handy feature that the Google Home offers is a guest mode. This mode lets people use the Google Home for music playback without needing to be connected to your Wi-Fi network. It also means that guest song choices won’t be saved to your music history.
To activate guest mode, tap on the Devices icon on the main screen in Google Home app (the icon on the top right), then tap on the ‘…’ button next to the name of your speaker. In the pop-up menu, select ‘Guest mode’, and you’ll see the corresponding screen appear with the PIN code that guests will need to enter in order to access the Google Home sans Wi-Fi network access.
For guests to access the Google Home, they’ll need to use an app that supports Google Cast, which includes Google Play Music, YouTube and Chrome. While media is playing, they can tap on the Cast button in the relevant app, at which point it will search for nearby devices. It may be able to auto-connect, but otherwise, it will request the PIN code generated in the previous step.
THE ONLY PHYSICAL BUTTON ON THE GOOGLE HOME IS THE MICROPHONE BUTTON, WHICH YOU CAN PRESS ONCE TO MUTE IT – HANDY IF YOU DON’T WANT THE SPEAKER ‘EAVESDROPPING’ ON YOUR CONVERSATIONS.