Google Home Mini: My Experience Report

E-commerce companies are spoiling us with all these massive discount days and shopping festivals. There is an on-going debate on who is making the money and who is burning some more. However there is one thing for sure, consumers are grabbing deals to their benefits.

As part of Flipkart’s Big Billion Day, the Google Home Mini was on a discount. Grabbed it. Spent some time with it and I think this is an interesting device which will get more useful as it gets more smarter. I am sure there is team at Google which is hard at work to make this happen.

So what am I doing with it:

• Routines. I have set routines for commands like Good Morning where it plays my morning music. Then there is the “toothbrush time” which is set to a 2 minute timer and is helping the daughter spend good time brushing & cleaning (hopefully!).
• Besides training Google Home, my daughter now sets a timer for her screen time. When Google says time up, the TV is switched off.
• Personal Assistant. I have connected my Gmail, Google Calendar & Todoist. So I can now “Add Task”, make Calendar entries all without having to type on the phone.
• All flight details, hotel reservations & restaurant bookings land up in Gmail. So the assistant can read some of it and tell you “What time is the flight? What time is the table booked?” I find this useful since some bookings are made way in advance and you tend to forget the exact details.
• Quick updates. There are somethings for which doing a search on the mobile is just too boring. Asking the assistant is much easier – “Whats the current USD rate?” bang comes the answer.
• For fun, daughter and I are often testing Google’s knowledge – so we ask her to tell us something new (did you know Kangaroos can jump across almost 26ft!!). My daughter even gets help on her spellings.
• I like Google for those small reminders – time to make a call, medicine time etc.

Next in line is getting some smart lights and connecting them to Google Home. Nothing like having the lights and music set just at your command.

Music reminds me. Google Home currently only allows you to call out the public playlists, so you can’t ask it to play “Kapil’s Lonely Soul” playlist, yet.

If they did enable this, I can think of some great Routines connected to my playlists.

Google Home in India, yet can’t make phone calls. This should also make things a lot more easier. I did try Google Duo calls but that too didn’t work. Maybe because I am on an iPhone.

Are you using one of these smart assistants? Share your recipe on how are you using it.