How to Connect a Bluetooth Speaker to Google Home
Your Google Home is a great device for asking the weather, setting alarms , controlling your smart home, or even creating a network of connected speakers , but you may not have an additional Google Home speaker to create a stunning sound setup in your home or apartment. That’s okay: you can just stream music through any bluetooth speakers you have with decent sound – after all, who needs your google speaker?
Prepare Bluetooth Speaker and Google Home to Connect
First, turn on the bluetooth speaker and leave it in pairing mode. Then open the Google Home app and tap on the Google Home speaker you want to sync with the Bluetooth speaker. Click on the settings icon – the gear – in the upper right corner, then scroll down and click on “Default speaker”.
Tap Connect Bluetooth Speaker and your Google Home speaker will search for the speakers you want to pair with.
When the Bluetooth speaker appears, tap to select it and then tap Done.
You will be taken back to the previous screen where you will want to make sure the newly added Bluetooth speaker is selected by default. (You can change the default speaker at any time – from which music sounds when you talk to that specific Google Home speaker.)
The next time you ask Google Home to play your favorite song, the music should go through the paired Bluetooth speaker. More commands for the Google Assistant, such as “What’s the weather?” should come out of the google home speaker. Don’t forget that you still need to route your voice commands to a real smart speaker for this to work.
If you want to have fun, you can also add multiple Bluetooth speakers in different rooms; follow the same process and connect each bluetooth speaker to a separate Google Home device. Then combine your Google Home speakers into a group and set the group as the default target for your audio. It’s a more sophisticated way to get multi-room audio, but it’s a decent option if your Bluetooth speakers sound better than your Google Home speakers.
This story was originally published in 2018 by Jacob Kleinman and was updated on May 3, 2020 by Emily Long. Our updates include the following: revised steps to match the current Google app interface, added screenshots, and rewrote the first paragraph.