Google Home is the go-to smart home experience for a lot of people — and for good reasons. We’ve seen the platform evolve quite a bit over the years, with enhanced features and improvements to stability, along with better compatibility with more hardware. Of course, there’s always more that can be added, but for the most part, it’s a fairly complete and comprehensive solution.
With that said, a new update has rolled out for Google Home, adding support for hardware smart buttons, which can give users the ability to control their smart home devices, routines, automations, and more at the touch or press of a button. We’re pretty much going full circle here, moving away from physical hardware, and now going back to including it as part of our smart home setups.
Everything old is new again
The news comes from 9to5Google, who spotted support for hardware buttons in the latest Google Home version 4.8 update. Smart buttons have been on the market for a little, but with Google Home finally supporting the hardware, it should bring a whole new way to interact with smart home products in your home or office.
It’s unclear if all devices are supported, but since this is going live, folks should be able to test a wide range of products available in order to get an idea of how wide compatibility is. In addition to smart buttons being supported now, this update will also minimize a major error that’s been plaguing Google Home for some time.
A much-needed fix
Those who frequently use the app to monitor their home or office may have experienced interruptions when trying to play back captured video with a “Video not available” error message.” This currently happens when trying to access a video “from a notification or when clicking on a recent event.” According to Google, this issue should now improve, with a reduced chance of the message popping up.
So while we’d love to see a full fix, this will have to do for now. For the most part, these are some huge changes to Google Home, which will only make the experience better. If you want to give all these new features a try, be sure to update the app through the Google Play Store.
