Google recently pushed an update for its Google Home app, bringing long-awaited support for smart buttons to its automation features.
This update introduces several new starters and conditions, including:
- Humidity reaches a specific level
- Robot vacuum docking
- Battery status on a device
- Switch or button is pressed (available as a starter only, covering single, multi-press, long press, and long press release)
- Binary state for supported devices (like closed or opened windows, contact or no contact, freeze or no freeze, leak or no leak)
Starters, conditions, and actions have been around for several years now, allowing you to create customized automations for your smart home devices. These elements together form the "if this, then that" logic that controls your smart gadgets.
Starters are the triggers that begin an automation, such as a specific time or a device changing its state. Conditions are optional criteria that must be met for an automation to proceed after being triggered. Actions are the tasks the automation performs once the starter fires and any conditions are satisfied, perhaps turning on lights or adjusting a thermostat.
Only one action, setting a smart light to a specific color or temperature, was added to this update.
Apart from the new automation capabilities, this update brings a "foundational" fix for camera close-to-live playback, reducing "Video not available" errors when you launch the Google Home app from a notification or click on a recent event.
Speaking of Google Home, Google has a new smart speaker on the way, seemingly reviving the "Google Home" branding that it largely abandoned in 2019 in favor of Nest.
The new Google Home Speaker features an oval design with 360-degree audio and allows grouping with other Nest and Home speakers and introduces a new capability to pair two speakers with a Google TV Streamer for spatial surround-sound audio.