Google today announced that products from its fellow Alphabet-owned company, Nest, will be more deeply integrated with its family of Home smart speakers, allowing for multi-step “routines” you can trigger with simple phrases like “good morning.”
If you’re not a Nest owner, Google says the feature should work with over 1,000 smart home products from over 100 brands. The company also announced new kid-friendly accounts for Home, so kids can have their preferences saved as part of a large linked family account. The news was presented onstage at the company’s Pixel 2 hardware event in San Francisco.
Amazon last week announced a similar feature for its Echo speaker line, so one phrase can now, for instance, turn the lights on, roll up a window shade, read you the news, and start boiling water. Amazon also has kid-friendly account features for its Echo line as well.
For Google, it appears the integrations will work best with Nest products. The Nest product integration list includes the new Nest Hello video doorbell and the Nest Secure home security system, both of which were announced just last week.
So now, if you own Nest Hello, your Google Home will be able to relay the doorbell ring to you and, if you subscribe to the Nest Aware subscription service that enables facial recognition, even tell you who’s standing there. If you own a Nest Cam, you can tell Google Home to stream the feed to your TV using Chromecast, while a Nest Secure integration means saying, “Hey Google, goodnight,” will arm your security system.
For an exclusive look at all the new Google devices announced, check out our interview with CEO Sundar Pichai.