Every morning when I'm standing in our walk in closet I call out "Hey Google! What's the weather today?" It makes me smile because there was a time when I thought these Google Homes or Amazon Alexas were frivolous and not something I'd get much use out of. I'm not exaggerating when I say we use these things every single day, multiple times a day!
In case you were on the fence about making your home 'smart', I thought I'd share a few of our favorite ways to use our Google Home(S!) We have several. We have the traditional Google Home in our living room, a Google Home hub in the kitchen, and then Google Home minis in the office, dining room and our bedroom. The hub is my favorite, but the minis are just as useful and very inexpensive! (Seriously, shop around...we got one of our minis for free for signing up for Spotify.)
To be clear, this post is not sponsored. I genuinely love our Google homes and I wanted to share some ways we use them. I would like to stress that I don't think you should buy anything you can't budget easily for!
Setting A Timer
There is just something about not having to take off your oven mitts to set the timer on your oven! In fact the button on my stove was always smudgy because of pressing it with dirty hands. We have Google set timers for us almost every time we cook. It's also really helpful to set a timer when you want to do a 'power hour' of cleaning or need to know when to go switch out the laundry.
Turn Off, On and Dimming Lights
We recently added smart bulbs into the lamps of the main areas of our house. It's absolutely wonderful to crawl into bed at night and have Google turn out the lights for you. Or have her dim the lights when a movie is starting!
Playing Music Throughout The House
You can play music in a single room, but we've also set up our speakers to play simultaneously. This might be my favorite feature! You haven't lived until you've blasted Disney music throughout your entire house and got to town cleaning!
Watching Youtube While Doing Dishes
As I mentioned we have a Hub in the kitchen, and it's so fun to watch a vlog or informative video while doing the dishes. You can actually cast anything to this screen, so I can catch up on a tv show too. This video feature is really neat, because you can even pull up a recipe how-to video and follow it while you cook yourself!
White Noise
We've set up an evening routine that is started by saying "Okay, Google, good night." This triggers our lights going out and setting an alarm for the morning. But then it plays soothing sounds to fall asleep to. It has easily become one of my favorite features! I love the sound of chirping crickets. It really does help you fall asleep faster.
Digital Photo Frame
I absolutely love displaying photos around our house. The reality is that we have thousands of photos and you can only frame so many. You can set your Hub to display random photos from Google photos, but we found that it was a little bit too random. Instead, we created an album on Google photos for it to display. I selected all of my favorite pictures and it created such a great slideshow!
Broadcast System
This makes me sound super lazy, but one really cool feature of having more than one Google home is that you can broadcast a message into another room. If Blake is in the office and I'm in the bedroom he can't really hear me, so this is a really useful feature.
Connect to Your Other Smart Devices
While we only have one other smart device, I love that we have the potential to have a very 'smart' home in the future. We do have a Roomba, and it's so nice to be in my living room doing stretches after my workout and be able to have Google start the vacuum. Totally unnecessary? Yes, but really cool!
Entertaining My Niece & Nephews
We don't have kiddos, so when my niece and nephews come over I'm always trying to find new ways to keep them entertained. Sometimes they get tired of the same old legos we have stashed away. One fun thing to do with them is ask Google questions. Our favorite is asking what different animals 'say'. They love hearing the roar of a lion! Nothing makes my heart want to burst like hearing my nephew Carter try to say rhinoceros.
Leave a comment for me below if you have some of these smart devices! Are you team Google or are you an Alexa person? What are you favorite features?
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