Google officially launched its first ever smart home speaker, Google Home, during an event held in San Francisco back in October this year. Basically, the speaker acts as a central hub for all your smart home products and services, which then can be controlled by an AI-powered virtual assistant called Google Assistant. At the time of launch, the list of products and third-party services which were supported by Google Home were rather small, but Google promised that it will eventually add new integrations with Google Home to expand its capabilities further. As promised, Google has been adding support for the new products and third-party services with Google Home lately, just a while back the company integrated Netflix service and Google Photos with the Google Home speaker, which allows users to watch their favorite videos and photos from their Netflix account and Google Photos account respectively to their Chromecast-connected TV sets, by simply giving a voice command.
Now, Sony has announced that its recent firmware update has enabled some of its existing speakers and 4K HDR TV sets to work with the Google Home speaker. Please note that only those Sony devices which have Chromecast built-in have been integrated with the Google Home speaker – you can follow the source link below to see if your device is listed as a supported device or not. Once set up with the Google Home speaker, users will be able to play videos from a variety of video services, YouTube and Netflix for example, on their Sony 4K HDR TV by just giving a simple voice command. Talking about the music casting, users will be able to play music from music services like Spotify, Google Play Music, YouTube Music and so on, to their Sony speakers with just a voice command; for example, you can issue the following command to your Google Home: “Ok Google, play my party playlist from Spotify on my Sony speaker,” and it will start playing music on your Sony speaker.
Not only that, you can even ask Google Home to play music by artist, genre, album, playlist, mood and even take control of the music without touching any single button. Thanks to Google’s Multi-room feature, users can also synchronize their music on the Google Home speaker and Sony speakers, which makes it possible to play the same music on the Google Home speaker and connected Sony speakers together, so you can enjoy your favorite music across the multiple rooms. Note that to use the Multi-room feature, you first need to create a group called “all speakers” in the Google Home app.