Voice control on the AVR-X3500H

the device settings in the HEOS app, to rename the receiver to something easier to say. I went for ‘Denon Receiver’.

As I write, the commands are limited to setting the volume or muting or unmuting the sound. If you’re playing network audio (so the receiver is, in effect, the source device) you can also skip tracks (both ways), pause playback and resume, or stop playback.

But this is something that’s being continuously developed. We are really just at the start of all this voice control stuff. Already Denon says that early this year the system will be enhanced by adding the ability to choose inputs by voice and switch the receiver on and off. And also to ‘Ask to play music (station/album/song) from a music service (only music services currently supported in HEOS app: no Spotify/Apple Music/Google Play Music)’. It also plans to add ‘implicit targeting’, which means not having to say the receiver’s name all the time.

A couple of points on volume control. The ‘Volume up’ and ‘Volume down’ commands work in 5dB increments. By default, the receiver shows its volume on a scale of 0 to 100. In the settings you can change this to -80dB to +18dB, which used to be the convention for home theatre receivers. That’s what I do. By voice you can also set the volume to an absolute value -- ‘Volume 20 on Denon Receiver’. This works on the 0 to 100 scale, regardless of the setting. If you say ‘Volume -20’, it will set the volume to 20 on that hundred point scale.

Finally, although the receiver works with Google Assistant, it is not a Chromecast device. You can’t just pipe music to it via Chromecast, nor have it act as the music device for another Chromecast speaker.