Home is supposed to integrate the Assistant into your life. It does a lot of neat things out of the gate, but Home also feels very unfinished. It needs more features if it’s going to be a useful digital assistant instead of a novelty. Here are 10 things ought to add to Home as soon as possible to make it an indispensable part of your life.
ile Home is positioned as a way to add Assistant to your domicile, it’s only fully usable for a single person. You cannot have more than one account tied to Home, so all the user-specific data accessible on Home belongs to whoever sets it up. The only option here is to disable “personal results” so other people can’t get into things like your calendar.
It should be able to figure out who’s who, though. is able to recognize voices—you train your phone’s OK trigger so only you can set it off. Home should have multiple accounts ID you by voice, returning personal results for the right account. The Home settings currently has a place for “nked Account(s)” (note the plural), so hopefully this is coming soon.
The “OK ” hotword has been a part of ‘s voice actions for a long time, but Home adds “Hey .” The idea is it will activate Home not your phone. That’s thoughtful, but it’s close enough to OK that your phone might wake up anyway. A custom launch phrase fixes that problem. And it might be fun to have a custom hotword like Motorola phones have. It’s definitely feasible would be a quick way to make Home feel more personal. o doesn’t want to pretend to be Scotty from Star Trek 4?
This must be an oversight on ‘s part—you can’t add reminders via Assistant on Home. It works fine on a xel with Assistant. This is an easy fix, should get on it immediately. Adding reminders is one of the most useful features in ‘s voice actions ecosystem. There’s no screen for you to look at verify it has the right information, so might need to tweak the flow of comms here.
Home is tied to your account, but for some reason it exists completely apart from your messages. You can ask your phone to send a message with Assistant, but not Home. Maybe we can chalk this one up to the transition to lo as ‘s main consumer messaging solution, but that’s no excuse. You should be able to dictate a Hangouts or lo message or even an email with Home. And while we’re at it, this would be a good opportunity to make lo work independent of your phone.
Home can communicate with Chromecast other cast targets on your network, but the content you can beam there is very limited. It’s basically just audio YouTube videos. has often partnered with Netflix to demo new casting features, but not this time. Casting YouTube videos is a nice start, but being able to launch a Netflix (or Hulu) video from Home by voice would be more useful. The same goes for your otos. Being able to tell Home to cast all your photos from a recent trip would be really hy.
One of Amazon’s big pushes with exa is e-commerce, which isn’t surprising considering that’s Amazon’s business. It offers good deals on items that can only be purchased by voice. should look into something similar for Home. It even mentions purchases offhedly in the settings; there’s just nothing to it yet.
sells a few things in the Store that could be made available in Home. Maybe deals on Nest Hue products that work with Home? Ideally, should partner with a retailer to offer more deals when you shop with Home. Remeber Express? haven’t heard much about it lately, but it’s the most obvious tie-in.
This is another feature that’s mysteriously absent from Home. You can’t make calendar appointments. It has to be coming, because it just makes so much sense. The pieces are already in place within Assistant. It can see your calendar to tell you about existing events, the phone version of Assistant can make new appointments. t’s get on this, .
One of the things Home is especially good at is playing music, but there’s no management aspect for your collection. The experience could be improved if Home knew how to thumbs-up tracks, add them to playlists, maybe even create new playlists.
Something a real assistant might do is read your messages, so why can’t Home do the same thing? en an email arrives, you should be able to have Home read the text to you. This could help you easily triage your email in the morning before you even pick up your phone.
There’s a Home app that’s used to monitor the status of the device, but why not make that a two-way street? Home could relay information about the state of your phone. For example, you could ask what your phone’s battery level, when it will be done charging, if you have any missed calls, so on. Or just say “ere’s my phone?” to make it beep loudly. If your phone isn’t in the area, could lock it, display a message on the screen, let you know where you left it at.
