The Google Home team announced yesterday that they are rolling out new features to their Google Home app. If you’re a fan of Google Home, you’ll definitely want to check out some of these amazing new features that let you truly automate your home.
New Starters and Actions
Google is expanding their offering of Starters and Actions under Automations. Automations are a routine of tasks that run, where Starters are the things that trigger the automation to start, and Actions are the things an automation does. This is a very fun, and powerful change for users as it lets them automate more of their home.
There are quite a few new Starters and Actions to take advantage of, letting you automate even more of your Google Home environment. Here’s the full chart:
| New Starters | New Actions |
| Device is open or closed | Open / close (single direction) |
| Device is plugged in or charging | Pause / unpause |
| Temperature sensor changes | Timer start / pause / resume / cancel |
| Volume is muted or unmuted | Volume mute / unmute |
| Device is docked / undocked | Dock device (such as a robot vacuum) |
| Active light effect | Light effects (pulse / sleep / wake / color loop) |
| Lock is jammed | Reboot device |
| Humidity sensor changes | Set humidity percentage |
| Occupancy Sensing | Run software update |
So you could add a notification if you’ve left your garage door open, change the lightbulb colors to more red as night approaches, or turn on lights when someone enters a room. These new Starters and Actions add a bunch of possibilities to Google Home.
For more information on Google Home’s new Starters and Actions or to see device compatibility check out the release notes here.
