How many smart speakers do you have at home?
The ability to cast media from an Android phone feels like second nature but legalities get in the way of us taking it for granted and not every app includes it by default. The ones that do, like YouTube and YouTube Music, are very conveniently able to pass their audio, video, or both to the plethora of devices that support the protocol. Now, with a new tweak to the Cast interface, this process is getting even easier for people who have to juggle a lot of screens and speakers.
A new subheader at the top of the Google Cast UI, which appears when you tap the Cast icon, will now suggest a particular device or devices to cast to (via Chrome Unboxed). In the example captured below, the “Suggested” section contains “Bathroom speaker” and probably has something to do with the user selecting that speaker frequently enough during the time of a day or for a particular song being played. Chrome Unboxed thinks it’s the latter, but we’d be more interested to see the ingredients going into the black box here — where does speaker proximity play into this? If you’ve got a lot of Cast-enabled devices at home, having a Suggested speaker chip pop up at the top would make things easy.
This feature seems to be server-fed rather than tied to the operating system, so if you’re jamming out around the living room on a regular basis, you should look forward to the chip appearing for you at some point.
Google with its I/O developers conference this year announced that you’ll soon be able to cast from your phone to your Chromebook or even a car, alongside revealing that it’s working on bringing casting capabilities to new products. Cast’s device suggestions only joins these upcoming improvements.
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