Nowadays, there are few more trendy things regarding home furnishing than the idea of a smart home. Be it speakers, vacuums, fridges, or any other appliances - if they can work with your voice assistant, they are THE thing to buy.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, as smart appliances make common house routines so much more convenient.Best smart speakerscan keep you up to date with news and conveniently play your favorite tunes, asmart coffee makerwill brew your coffee to be ready when you wake up, and asmart indoor camerawill make your home secure without any hassle on your part. It all just works and makes your life that much more convenient.
What’s more, that’s only the tip of the iceberg regarding smart home capabilities. Google Home - an app that helps you set up, manage, and automate your smart appliances - has many handy features that will make your smart home even smarter. Among them, the Routines feature is undeniably one of the best ones, andtheir new addition called “Help me script”can make your smart appliances do your bidding in no time.
What is Google Home’s new “Help me script”?
Even though using basic automations is really simple, the advanced features of Google Home, which require a knowledge of a coding language and quite a bit of time and know-how, can be a little overwhelming. Fortunately, Google recognized this and came up with a solution.
Cue the introduction of the new “Help me script” feature. As scripting your own automations is hard and requires a lot of work and prior knowledge, the feature was relegated to a handful of enthusiasts. To mitigate this,“Help me script” is a generative AI that translates your cues into automations.
So far, the feature is not available to the public, but once it lands, it will open the gates to advanced automation features to all, not just those already in the know.
The feature will let you write prompts describing what you’d like your automation to do with the starters and all the actions, as well as any additional info you need (such as “When the smoke alarm goes off, flash all the lights in the house and announce an emergency over the speakers”). Then, the AI will translate your prompt into a script. You can then copy this generated code and paste it into the script editor or even use it as a starting point for an even more ambitious project.
So far, there is no news about when the “Help me script” feature will be released publicly, as Google says it is still in its language model learning phase. Once that is done, you’re able to expect the news to be announced on Google’sHome Automation forum.
What are Routines for Google Home?
First, let’s have a refresher on what Routines in Google Home are. In the most basic terms, these are automated scripts that your devices follow. These scripts often look like conditional sentences, meaning that IF something happens, THEN do something. In other words, one thing turns the automated script on, and the script is realized by your devices.
Let’s see an example of this. You can set a routine that starts when someone turns on your living room TV. The routine says that when the TV is turned on, your smart bulbs in the living room get dimmed, and your speakers turn on. So, every time you turn on your living room TV, the rest of this routine gets executed, making it a breeze to create a great movie-watching experience.
Google Home allows you to create two kinds of routines - Personal Routines and Household Routines.
What are Personal Routines?
Personal Routines are the ones that are tailored especially for you and are usually done by talking to your Google Assistant. These are the usual things that you want to know and get done throughout the day. For example, you can set a wake-up or bedtime routine. The first one activates after saying, “Hey Google, good morning,” and turns on your lights, tells you the weather, and goes through your daily news. The latter dims the lights, turns on your alarms, and turns on Do Not Disturb mode on your smartphone.
These Routines are great to use throughout the day to boost your productivity or let you relax and enjoy a quiet moment the way you like it. You set a personal routine for your favorite activities, and all the little things you’d have to do to make yourself comfortable are done automatically.
What are Household Routines?
The other option that you have is Household Routines. These automations are slightly different, as they are not bound to your personal Google Assistant - all household members share them.
Household Routines lets you automate certain interactions with your smart appliances and create sets of tasks that will be done automatically once you do something around the house. These are often much more complicated than Personal Routines, as Google lets you create complicated, multi-layered automations.
Household Routines can go from easy, two-step processes (such as an instruction to turn on your bedroom lamp when you turn off your smart alarm clock) to incredibly complex sets of automations that turn your whole home theater for you, dim your lights and close your blinds when you turn on the TV.
In short, these are the routines that are set for all of your smart appliances, making it possible to connect them and allowing them to work together to make your home even more cozy and easier to live in.
How to create Routines?
As you can see, creating Routines in Google Home might change how you live and interact with your smart home. This is also a feature that is extremely easy to pick up but has a lot of depth when you really get into it, making it a great tool both for beginners, as well as advanced users.
Even the way to create Routines reflects the two different levels of users. Firstly, you cancreate Personal and Household Routines through the Automations menu:
However, sometimes, this easy and user-friendly method is not enough. That’s why Google Home also has a script editor that lets you write your code and create advanced scripted automations. This is done on Google Home’s web app, and you can learn more about it via Google’s handy instructions. It helps you write your own scripts and gives you the basics of the YAML language - a scripting language you’ll need to use for your custom automations.
