Enhance Your Google Home with Smart Household Automations

If you think it’s just about who can edit and access them, you’re missing out on a lot of capabilities.

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Automations are really the best part of smart home hubs, and Google Home has one of the best automation engines out there. In the simplest terms, these automations allow you to set a trigger and a resulting action, like, “At 10 p.m., turn off the speakers,” or, “When I say, ‘let there be light,’ turn on all the household lights.”

But what exactly can you do?

If you’ve only set up personal routines, you probably thought the only option for triggers were the limited options offered around time, voice command, or location. These basic actions are great for most of your needs, but at some point, you likely found yourself wondering how to set up automations that were based around another home device condition. For instance, “When the TV turns on, turn off the reading lights.” The secret is using Google Home household routines instead of personal routines.

What triggers you can use with Google Home personal automations

Personal automations are a great way to get into basic routines and allow for four different criteria as a trigger for automations: 

• “When you use a specific phrase to Google Assistant”: You can set multiple options and variants for this, which is really useful. You should almost always set a verbal cue like this in addition to any other triggers, so you can run an automation on the fly if you need to. 

• “A specific time of day”: On whatever days of the week you choose. 

• “Sunrise or sunset”: You can offset this trigger by as much time before or after as you’d like. For example, “Run this routine three hours before sunrise on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

• “When you arrive or leave a specific location”: Google uses your phone’s location to determine this, which is most useful with home- and work-related automations.

How to use set up a Google Automation using a device condition as a trigger

By selecting “Household” routine instead of “Personal” routine when setting up a new automation, you are given an additional trigger possibility called “When a device does something.”  If you click on that trigger condition and open it up, you should see every device connected to Google Home and a limited set of conditions related to each device. For instance, lights and plugs have “on” and “off” conditions, usually. Some lights might have dimness and color options as well. A thermostat or thermometer will likely have temperature as an option. Speakers might have volume as options. You can explore these options to set conditions that will trigger additional actions.

Set up an easy device trigger

I’ve read a number of arguments that a night light is the perfect example of an automation. Let’s say you have a motion or presence sensor in your hallway and a nightlight or dimmable light in that same hallway.

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