Google Assistant Adds Valentine’s Day Features to ‘Turn Up the Love’
Google Assistant has some new features designed to help people celebrate Valentine’s Day. The new commands for the voice assistant highlight Google’s ongoing push to integrate Google Assistant as the hub for smart homes.
Valentine’s Day Assistant
As a Valentine’s Day celebration, people with a Google Assistant-powered smart speaker or smart display can ask the voice assistant to “turn up the love.” The device will start playing romantic jazz music to set the mood. If color-changing lights are hooked up to the device, Google Assistant will adjust them to shine in reds and purples. If that’s not to your taste, Google Assistant has several other romance-specific commands. Users can learn how to say I love you in eight different languages by wishing the voice assistant a happy Valentine’s Day, request romantic music and recipes, or get a special poem put together from Google Assistant by asking if it loves them.
Routine Love
The “turn up the love” command is a smart way for Google Assistant to show off its ability to handle multiple actions with a single command. These routines simplify getting Google Assistant to do more than one thing simultaneously. In this case, it’s lights and music, but the same system can be applied to security cameras, thermostats, and other smart devices that Google Assistant is connected to. The routines also share similarities with Android Action Blocks, which Google designed as a way of making Android devices more accessible to people with disabilities.
Google is using Valentine’s Day to suggest how straightforward and useful Google Assistant is as a smart home AI. The company has been working to boost its place in that ecosystem. The new Nest Wifi, a router with Google Assistant built-in and the Nest Mini, a smart speaker with a price point equal to the Amazon Echo Dot, are all part of the way Google is trying to compete with Amazon and Apple at becoming the center of the smart home. The new devices are supposed to grab customers who may at first just want a good router or cheaper smart speaker, but they also make it easier to create a smart home with Google as the foundation. Google Assistant doesn’t want to be just a casual date; it wants to be everyone’s Valentine.
Follow @voicebotai Follow @erichschwartz
On Google Home’s Third Anniversary, the Future is a Connected Nest
