The Google Home app

Both the Google Home Hub (left) and JBL’s Link 20 (above) have Google Assistant built in, and both of them operate within the Google Home app. While some users may never enter the app except to set them up, there are plenty of settings in there which can be useful.

One little known ability is to nominate a default playback speaker — any Chromecast speaker can link with another Bluetooth speaker so that you can say “Hey Google, play Crowded House” without specifying any other information, and the music should emerge from your defined default. Mind you when we tried this, linking a Google Home to first KEF’s LSX and then the Bluesound Pulse Mini, it didn’t always work, and when it did, the transmission quality was appalling, destroying the treble.

Other recent additions include the ability to turn on ‘Continued Conversation’, so that after the first ‘Hey Google’ question you can keep asking things without including ‘Hey Google’ with every request. Privacy advocates will, of course, ask how long it keeps listening! The answer from our attempts seems to be only about 10 seconds (during which everything is being piped off to Google’s storage servers for analysis).

Google Home Hub also got a recent update presenting a dashboard of all your smart Google devices,

and if grouped for playback together, also to control all their separate volumes from the screen (though you could do this from the Google Home app anyway).

For music, it’s also easy to set up multiple ‘Groups’ of your Chromecast-enabled speakers for multiroom playback. We made a group called ‘Party’, added our Google Home, Home Hub and the Link 20 to it. Then when we opened Spotify, we selected ‘Party’ as our device (see left), and the tunes flowed from all three speakers at once, in perfect synchronisation.