So your home now has a. You're about to enter the wonderful world of digital personal assistants. All you have to do is set it up. After taking your Home from the box and admiring its fine styling, download the Google Home app on your phone. Home will walk you through the typical steps of choosing a language, setting up the Wi-Fi, that sort of thing. You can do this in your sleep.
Before long, the app wil ask where in your home you are placing your Home. Choose someplace accessible, like the bedroom or living room. Once that's done, the app will prompt you to sign in to your Google account. This lets Home tap your calendar, your email, your flights and so much more, so Home can answer you when you ask, 'OK, Google – what time is my interpretive dance class?' Want to use Home to play music?
Recently, Google has given Assistant on iPhone a bit of extra functionality with Apple Music integration. Enabled through the Google Assistant app settings on iOS, users can now use Assistant to. Google Music for Mac looks great, and works well. Technically, it's a custom wrapper that's accessing Google Music via the web, but it's a really good looking one.
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Of course you do. You'll need a Chromecast, Chromecast Audio to make it work. Open the Home app and tap Menu in the upper left corner. Then choose More SettingsTV’s and Speakers to add the device. With that, you can enjoy the convenience of playing music or watching TV without doing anything more than saying, 'OK, Google.' From the comfort of your couch.
Connect your smart lights to Google Home as well. For all the Philips Hue or Samsung SmartThings owners out there, you have full control when the lighting systems are connected with Assistant. 'Okay Google, change the color of light in the living room.' This is perfect when you are stuck cooking and your date is coming over in ten minutes. Isn't technology awesome?
Backup and Sync lets you, well, backup and sync photos and files from PC folders, USB keys and SD cards to the cloud, so they're available anywhere. The original Google Drive was not so convenient, as it required you to use two separate apps for files and photos. That could affect your storage space dramatically - if you upload images to Drive, it counts against your space, but if you upload them to Photos (using the 'high,' not 'original' setting), it doesn't.
At the same time, PC backups are now a more automated process. Google also fully launched Drive File Stream, an app that performs roughly the same chores as Backup and Sync, but for enterprise and business users. It has more team-oriented features, like on-demand file streaming and access to Team Drives (for a comparison chart and other info, ). The loss of Drive on the desktop won't affect your life much, unless you really liked the old Drive logo, which has been changed to something that resembles Microsoft's OneDrive icon.
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Google also points out that you may soon see messages notifying you that 'Drive for Mac/PC is going away,' presumably to join and others in the great.