Ian Knighton/CNET
At the Google I/O Developer Conference, the search giant quietly announced it’s adding compatibility with Google Play Movies to Google Home.
From the time the Google Home smart speaker first hit the market in fall 2016, you could issue cool commands such as “Hey Google, play The Office on my main TV.” The digital assistant built into your smart speaker, called Google Assistant, could talk to the Chromecast streamer attached to your TV, and launch content from Netflix.
As Google Home has grown up, it’s got even better at controlling TVs with additional streaming partners such as HBO Now, but for some reason, you could never control Google’s own video streaming service — Google Play Movies. That’s finally about to change.
The new feature is rolling out starting Wednesday, so if you have a big library of Google Play Movies, you’ll soon be able to send them to your TV with a voice command to your smart speaker. Google Assistant got better in a number of ways at I/O, including a new integration with LG TVs and a mind blowing experiment where it can call restaurants on your behalf.
This change is certainly a smaller leap than that program, called Duplex, but it could be a nice quality of life upgrade for folks heavily invested in Google’s ecosystem.
Google I/O 2018
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