Your own assistant at home! Google Home Review

Google Home recently launched in the UK after being available in America for a few months. You might have heard of Alexa, well Google Home is Google’s contender in the market of technological assistance in the home.

Google Home is a small speaker with built-in microphones which are voice activated. The Google Home assistant is a powerful tool which can perform a huge range of tasks.

We received the Google Home device a couple of months ago, after attending a wonderful launch event in London. The event was so much fun, wonderful food (cooked by past Masterchef contenders), a super cool venue and fabulous company.

With the gorgeous Hannah from Make, Do & Push

I couldn’t wait to get it home and put it through its paces. The design’s quite attractive and you can even change the colours of the device to suit your tastes, the mesh grill on the bottom can be changed to vary the colours.

I had a few bumps getting the device connected to my phone for Netflix in particular, but in the end, it all synced up and worked perfectly.  Simply download the app to your phone and then connects services such as Netflix, YouTube and Spotify to the device to then distribute to other technology in your home, such as selected speakers or TVs etc. You then simply ask Google questions or to perform a number of actions and what it work it’s magic! Or if you’re like Ava you spend HOURS saying ‘Hey Google, tell me a joke’.

The list of things Google Home can do is huge. From demonstrating various animal sounds on demand (which Ava finds hilarious!), to adding things to my shopping list, turning lights off and on, adjusting the heating, playing specific YouTube shows on the TV, working as a timer and so much more. You can ask Google about the weather, to play the radio, to tell you about your day and even how long a specific journey will take. The device is compatible with Nest, Samsung SmartThings, WeMo and any device that has Chromecast built in. It also works with various content providers, but exciting it works with IFTTT, which expands its functionality even further. Using IFTTT you can even tweet directly from Google Home!

Overall, Google Home is a great addition to our home and as updates roll out I can only imagine it will get better still. I really like the Google Home device, as a busy mum, it’s like having a second pair of hands sometimes, which is always welcomed. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops in the months and years to come.

Have you seen the Google Home? Would you like to try it out?

Disclosure: We were sent a Google Home in return for our honest review.