Google Home will now wake you up with your song of choice
You can also, finally, play music from your own music library on Google's smart speaker.
The Google Home family.
If you have trouble waking up in the morning, you can now recruit your favorite musician to help nudge you out of bed. Google updated its Google Home smart speaker on Wednesday with a couple of nice quality-of-life features. The main one will let you set an alarm that wakes you up with your music of choice.
The Google Home is a voice-controlled smart speaker with Google's digital assistant (just called Google Assistant) built in. With a voice command, you can control your smart home , add entries to your calendar and set an alarm. Previously, when you set an alarm, Google would wake you at your designated time with standard alarm beeping.
Starting Wednesday, you can give the command, "Hey, Google, set an alarm for 9 a.m. that plays 'Bohemian Rhapsody.'" You can pick your favorite song or artist. Amazon's competing assistant Alexa has a similar feature that rolled out in December.
Also included in today's update is a feature that lets you check the TV schedule and play music from your own music library with your voice. The first lets you ask when your favorite show is on next, or what channel it's on, and Google will be ready with the info.
The second feels like a feature that should have been there since the beginning. Before this update, you couldn't play your own music from your Google Play music library with a voice command on Google Home. You could only play songs from the Google Play streaming service or any other linked service. At least the feature is live now, so better late than never.
