Prank Your Friends With Google Home and IFTTT
Voice assistants are still dumb computers programmed to give you answers to questions and manage your Spotify playlist. But for once, I’d like my Google Home to help me with a joke or two when my brother comes to visit. After all, what’s the use of a voice assistant if it can’t help you roast your friends? Use IFTTT (If This Then That) to make your voice assistant say whatever you want (within reason) and prank your unsuspecting friends and family. Or, if you are me, do it to offend the people you love the most.
Lifehacker has a wicked week right now, which means we’re learning some not-so-decent methods to deal with shit. We like to think we’re shedding light on these tactics as a way to help you do the opposite, but if you’re really mean, this week might not be of any use to you. You decide.
Making jokes from IFTTT applets
To get started with setting up your voice assistant for some good old puzzles, you’ll need to download the IFTTT app (the web version works great too). IFTTT makes it easy to bundle services together and trigger actions based on certain conditions (for example, you can receive a text message every time it rains in the forecast). IFTTT has integrations with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, which runs Google Home. You can learn how to take full advantage of the online platform in our IFTTT guide .
To pair IFTTT with voice assistants, select your account to create a new applet and search for Google Assistant. From there, after granting IFTTT permission to access your Google Assistant, you can choose from four trigger options, each offering a different granularity regarding specific words or numbers.
After choosing a trigger option, you will need to fill in the information fields and provide the applet with your instructions. You can add a command along with two other optional commands to give the same single answer. For example, you can tell Google to respond to the phrase “My brother is visiting” or “The dog is coming back from a walk” with “Oh, what smells so bad in here?”
After entering the command and responding, Google Assistant will need to choose an action, even if you just want to hear a joke. You can add all sorts of actions like flashing smart lights or sending a text message to your phone, but as a workaround, you can just point IFTTT to something that will live behind the scenes. Select a service, such as Google Drive, and ask the Google Assistant to add it to your document or spreadsheet. It will create a new document or spreadsheet called “Simple Google Voice Commands” and let you add any text you want to it. Now, every time you say your bad joke, Google will add the text of your choice to the simple Google Voice commands document.
While I’d rather have my voice assistant take the joke home by saying, “What the hell is this scent?” It’s not that easy. If you want to introduce some profanity, go ahead, but the voice assistant is a little prim and proper. Google doesn’t like bad words and censors them (which is pretty funny in itself). You can always be wrong in words and see how far luck takes you. If you know you are inviting guests to dinner and you want to attract them to you with the help of your computerized friend in dynamics, IFTTT makes it easy enough to get an insult or two before they know what is wrong.