5 ways your Google Home is the MVP of football season
Your Google Home speaker is more than just a fancy music box. It's also your best fantasy football companion.
The Google Home speaker proved itself a worthy companion during the 2018 Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. But at long last it's football season, and Google Home can now help you stay on top of your fantasy football league as well as follow your favorite NFL teams.
Here are five ways Google Home can become the football assistant you always dreamed of.
Fantasy football
There is no shortage of options for keeping up with your fantasy football league through your phone, but the CBS Sports Assistant app (just a heads up that CBS is CNET's parent company) is an easy, hands-free way to get advice on how to manage your own team.
It will give you advice on which players you should start, add, drop or trade. The app will also provide score updates, trade valuations, value comparisons between players and more.
Sports knowledge and scores
If you ask your Google Home speaker about a player from a specific team (from any sport, for that matter), it will return some general knowledge. For instance, you can ask, "Hey, Google , who is the quarterback for the Panthers?" It will tell you who the starting and backup quarterbacks are. You can also ask for the results of recent games or how a team is doing in the current season.
If you get any more in-depth with your questions, however, you're not likely to get an answer. You can't ask how many passing yards Peyton Manning had in 2015, or how many tackles Luke Kuechly had last year.
For stats like that, you'll need to use the StatMuse app. The depth of the questions you can ask is pretty impressive and actually includes the voices of popular sports figures like Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Jerry Rice, Joe Buck and more.
If you hear one of those athletes answer a question, you can address them directly by saying something like, "Where did you go to college?"
Get football news
Out of the box, you can ask Google Home for football news. All you have to do is say, "OK, Google, football news." It will read a few of the most recent or relevant football news headlines and send those articles to Google Assistant on your phone.
You can also add this to your morning routine. When creating a new routine or editing an existing one, add an action that simply says "football news." Then each morning at the same time, or when you manually trigger the routine, you'll get the latest news from the world of football.
Listen to football radio and podcasts
If you like to listen to football radio or podcasts, you can use your Google Home speaker to do that, too. Using TuneIn, you can listen to all your favorite internet radio. Just say, "OK, Google, play ESPN radio."
Likewise, your favorite football podcasts can be streamed through Google Home, too. Say something like, "OK, Google, play the Around the NFL podcast." It's that simple. If you can't seem to find your preferred podcast using your voice, you can use your phone to cast it to the speaker.
Play trivia and games
Finally, there are a handful of fun games to play with your Google Home speaker. What Team, for instance, will describe an NFL team with obscure facts and you have to guess which team it is.
Super Bowl Quiz will also test your NFL knowledge by asking you multiple-choice trivia questions. Similarly, there is Steelers Trivia, Army Navy Football History Trivia, Clemson Football Trivia, New Orleans Football Trivia and others.
Now that you have your Google Home speaker set up to help with your football binging, here are nine other unusual things to try.
And if you're more of an Alexa household, Amazon's assistant is even better at helping you track your fantasy football team this season.