Four Things I Do to Make My Google Nest Devices More Useful
I’ve been using Google Nest speakers since they were called Google Home, when the company handed them out like candy. Over the years, I’ve mostly stuck to the basics of using the smart speakers to set timers, control lights , and get quick answers to random questions, but even those simple tasks aren’t without frustration. Part of the problem with these devices is how precise they are in how you talk to them, but I’ve learned a few tricks that make things easier.
Smart speakers in general are in a bit of an awkward phase right now. Most are still stuck with software that can only understand a few very specific phrases, and can get stuck if you don’t phrase a question or request exactly that way. Meanwhile, LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are somehow able to understand complex instructions , even if they sometimes have a hard time following those instructions.
It may be a while before smart speakers are pulled into our LLM-enabled future, but there are a few things you can do to make them work better in the meantime. In this article, I’ll focus on Google Home and its Nest speakers because that’s the ecosystem I personally use, but many of these tips will apply to other smart speaker systems, too. For example, while Google has Voice Match, Amazon Echo has Voice ID ; both of these tools identify who’s speaking to them. Even if you’re in a different smart speaker ecosystem, it’s worth digging around to see what your options are.
Try the Gemini preview (if you can)
Perhaps the most important feature of an LLM like Gemini is the interpretation of voice commands, but for now, Gemini is still locked in Public Preview. Although “public” may be a bit of an imprecise term. While you can choose to test Gemini on your smart speakers, there are a few conditions. You must:
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Become a Nest Aware subscriber. At its core, the Nest Aware subscription is mostly for the video features on your Nest cameras, but Google tends to add other smart home features to it. The Gemini preview is one of them. It costs $8/month or $80/year, but we probably wouldn’t recommend getting one just to try Gemini early.
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Sign up for the Google Home app public preview. There is a separate public preview for new Google Home features that you will need to sign up for before you can get the Gemini preview. You can find full instructions here depending on your devices.
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Sign up for experimental AI features. Once you’re in the Google Home public preview, you’ll receive a message in the Google Home app inviting you to turn on experimental AI features. Make sure this option is also turned on, or you’ll miss out on the Gemini option.
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Well, wait. Even after all that, Google doesn’t guarantee you’ll get immediate access to the Gemini preview, which is annoying. But if you want to try it, you’ll have to go through all of the above.
It’s not practical for most people at the moment, but if you’re already a Nest Aware subscriber, it might be worth a try. Google Nest devices currently use Google Assistant by default, which does little more than scan your queries for simple keywords. If you want to talk to your speaker in real, human-like sentences, you’ll inevitably need Gemini. It’s just a matter of when you can get it.
Create your own commands with Automations
Until Gemini becomes a widely available voice assistant, we’re stuck trying to squeeze our requests into a narrow smart speaker box. Luckily, Google Home has a really handy tool to make them less cumbersome: Automations. In a dedicated tab in the Google Home app, you can create automations (called Routines) that trigger multiple complex actions from simple phrases.
One of my favorites, I created a routine that activates when I say, “Hey Google: movie sign !” This little script will turn off the overhead lights in my living room, pause any smart speakers that are playing music, and turn on the backlight on my TV. Normally, these would all have to be separate commands, and while Google Assistant can sometimes handle multiple instructions at once, it can often fail. It rarely does.
Routines have some built-in functionality, like setting up your smart home devices, playing specific media, sending text messages, or even getting the weather forecast. If there isn’t already a preset action in the Routines menu, you can also add custom instructions. These will run as if you told Google Assistant to do them on its own. This is handy if you need to perform a command with a specific wording, but one that Google often misunderstands when spoken aloud.
Turn on Voice and Face Match for best results
Google touts Voice Match as a way to get personalized results based on who’s asking the question. For example, if you say “What’s on my calendar?” you might get a summary from your personal Google account, but someone else in your household will get theirs (and guests can’t access either calendar). While that’s all well and good, I personally find the feature useful for an entirely different reason: It can help Google learn what everyone in your home sounds like.
Any household with both male and female voices is familiar with this particular error. Someone with a female voice says, “Turn on the kitchen…turn on the kitchen … turn on the kitchen! ” Then a male voice from across the room bellows, “Turn on the kitchen.” And it works.
There are complex reasons for this , from simple coincidence to how microphones pick up higher and lower frequencies, but Voice Match can sometimes (sort of) help with this. While it doesn’t magically make a device’s microphone better or make it easier to distinguish your voice from background noise, it can help Google better decide how to process commands.
For example, two people who have Voice Match set up on the same device can set different default music services . Likewise, recommendations based on previous activity will be tailored to that person’s profile, rather than all activity across the same account.
Now, this may be anecdotal, but I’ve found that this can even help with my partners’ voices that aren’t recognized at all, like in the example above. Your mileage may vary, but in my experience, simply having a voice model that Google recognizes as a specific user can lead to the speaker distinguishing them from background noise.
Choose names for other smart devices carefully
Most smart home devices will walk you through the process of setting up and naming your devices, often labeling them based on what room they’re in. Individually, this isn’t a problem. But once you start combining multiple products, things get confusing.
It took me a while to figure this out when my Nest speaker started telling me it turned off “three devices” when I asked it to “turn off the kitchen.” You see, we only have two Philips Hue lights there. After a couple of weeks of confusion, I realized my partner had recently installed a Pura smart fragrance diffuser . It was also placed in the “kitchen” category, which meant I was turning off the air freshener every time I asked Google to dim the lights.
This can be tricky because the Google Home app organizes devices by room, meaning you can expect all devices in a room to turn off, but if a device has the same name as only one room, Assistant can get confused. An easy way to avoid this is to use clear, unique names for each device, be mindful of how you organize devices by room (both in their respective apps and in Google Home itself), and choose names that match how you’re most likely to identify the device out loud. Custom commands can also come in handy here if your naming schemes are getting too complicated.
Enable startup sound
It’s so simple that it seems like it should be the default. Usually, when you say “OK, Google” to your smart speaker or display, it lights up and starts listening, but unless you’re looking directly at it, you might not notice. However, you can set it to make a little sound to let you know it’s listening.
To enable this feature, open the Google Home app and find the device you want to make a sound for. Tap it and select Settings. Under Accessibility, turn on the Play Start Sound switch. Now, whenever you say “OK, Google,” you’ll hear a ding to let you know the device is listening.
It’s a small thing, but this feedback can be very useful. It’ll let you know instantly if your smart speaker simply didn’t hear you at all, so you don’t have to waste time issuing a full command before you figure out what’s going on. It can also help diagnose when the problem is something else. If you hear the ringing and then say your command, you know Google picked it up, but maybe it’s having trouble accessing the internet or misheard the command.