Google Home - anyone have one?

sparkymark75 · 2 May 2017 at 23:27

Since theres an Amazon Echo thread...

I had a voucher for money of at Maplin and rather than let it go to waste, I thought I'd take the plunge and order a Google Home (GH). It's actually better than I thought it would be.

I have it "hooked up" to my Logitech Harmony and it works great. I tell it to "Turn on the Xbox" and it does just that. "Watch TV" and the Sky box comes on.

I've now bought some TP-Link Smart Plugs and had them integrated within 10 minutes.

I chose this over the Amazon Dot as the GH seems to be more "intelligent". Gives more information when asked something, can translate into languages, etc

Since it's newer, it doesn't have the integrations that the Dot has to date but a lot of the missing local integrations can be covered by IFTTT. I'm moving house in a couple of months, I'll then be looking to get more kit such as Tado. I don't need to use it as a wireless speaker as I have a ton of Sonos kit so looking forward to them getting that integrated too.

D3K · 2 May 2017 at 23:32

Had one arrive this morning with the free Chromecast.
The response time from voice commands was extremely snappy. Unfortunately I mostly got "I cannot help with that". My phone does a better job.
The free Chromecast was a waste of space. Limited to whatever it can cast and not at 4K, nor using any of the TV's apps.

I'd love to convince myself I need a harmony to make this work, but in addition to Hive's and Hues that I also don't have I can see it snowballing financially with tech just to make it viable.

I'm not ready for it so it's back in the box going back tomorrow.

Glaucus · 3 May 2017 at 01:20

big thread here
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/google-home.18751627/

terley · 3 May 2017 at 01:27

D3K said:
Had one arrive this morning with the free Chromecast.
The response time from voice commands was extremely snappy. Unfortunately I mostly got "I cannot help with that". My phone does a better job.
The free Chromecast was a waste of space. Limited to whatever it can cast and not at 4K, nor using any of the TV's apps.

I'd love to convince myself I need a harmony to make this work, but in addition to Hive's and Hues that I also don't have I can see it snowballing financially with tech just to make it viable.

I'm not ready for it so it's back in the box going back tomorrow.

I'd say Chromecast is not intended for people who intend on streaming 4k or already have a smart TV

Caged · 3 May 2017 at 01:33

That's what the Chromecast 4K is for

Scam · 3 May 2017 at 11:29

D3K probably should have checked that

And I don't see many mainstreamapps that don't stream via Chromecast. Netflix, Google Play, Spotify, Google Music, BBC iPlayer etc, YouTube :confused:

Even Pocketcasts does.

I'm supremely tempted to get a GH. Even more so as I'm about to buy an AV receiver so I'm tempted to get the Harmony to go with it and use it as the OP does. I'd love to see some videos of it in action like that *goes off to trawl YouTube* But is the Harmony really necessary? If you use Chromecast to play music/video, if you tell your GH to do that via Chromecast then surely most modern amps will switch to that input automatically no?