Google Assistant has constantly been ranked as the ‘smartest’ among all the voice-based smart digital assistants, bar none. Sure, Alexa, Siri, Bixby and the others have quite a few cool tricks up their sleeves, but none of them can quite compete on even terms with Assistant, all things considered. While Google keeps adding new funtionalities to its digital assistant from time the time, the latest update rolled out to the software now brings a bunch of new features that have only increased its capabilities on the Google Home smart speaker.
According to the official support pages for Google Home, the smart speaker will gain the ability to control smart lights with “scenes” that are a bunch of color presets which can be used according to the mood of the user. It is important to note here that this is not a revolutionary feature by any means, and Google has been actually been tardy in adding ‘scenes’ support for Assistant. Having said that, for Google Home users, it’s still a case of better late than never.
One thing that is still not entirely clear, though, is how the feature will be implemented, as the support pages only mentions commands about activating or deactivating scenes and not much more. Where these ‘scenes’ will come from is still something that needs to be figured out, because there’s no direct mention of whether Home will be able to save its own scenes or will need to borrow them from other apps.
Another cool feature being rolled out is direct control of several smart home appliances, including washers, dryers, vacuums cleaners and dishwashers. While you could use IFTTT to control these devices with Google Home, the fact that you can now bypass third-party apps and do so directly is certainly a step in the right direction, although, it beggars belief that it took this long for Google to roll this out.
