6 Smart Speaker Features You're Probably Not Using

Not sure what your Amazon Echo and Google Home can do? Here are some hidden features and things you didn’t know you could do with your smart speaker or display.

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Smart speakers and displays from Amazon and Google offer a wealth of features. And yet, most people only use them for basic tasks like listening to music or checking the weather.

Of course, it’s hard to discover what these speakers can do. Most smart speakers are designed to have an invisible interface. Just speak a command and your music starts playing, or your timer starts counting down. This is great for using the commands you know, but it makes it very difficult to discover the ones you don’t.

Smart displays like the Amazon Echo Show and Google Home Hub can be just as frustrating, even with a touch screen, as neither platform has figured out a really good way to show users new features. So, we’ve found some of the most useful—and least gimmicky—ways to use your smart hubs that you might have missed.

6
Check Your Calendar on a Smart Display

Checking events on your calendar with a smart speaker is not the best experience in the world. It’s much easier to pull up your phone than listen to a speaker slowly rattle off everything on your agenda. However, a smart display makes it much more useful. You can see the day’s events and reminders you have set at a glance without even asking for it.

Google’s Home Hub will do this automatically for the account you use to set up the device, but for other accounts, or when using an Amazon Echo Show, you’ll need to manually connect your calendar.
5
Talk to People in Other Rooms

If you have smart speakers in multiple rooms of your house, then you also have an intercom system. The Amazon Echo accomplishes this with a feature called Drop In. You can use Drop In to call other Echo devices, just like making a phone call. However, the more useful feature is the ability to call other rooms of the house. You can send a message to your spouse in the den, or broadcast to the whole house that dinner is ready.

Google Home has a similar feature called Broadcast which, unfortunately, can’t target a specific speaker—it’s every speaker in your house or nothing. But it can send a message from your phone to your speakers, allowing you to communicate with your whole house even when you’re not home.
4
Turn Your Smart Display Into a Photo Album

This is another feature for a smart display, since it’s pretty hard to hear photos. Echo Show and Home Hub can display your pictures; by default, they pull photos from the internet to serve as idle background images, but you can change those settings and add your photos instead.

With the Echo Show, you can create a slideshow of your own images that will change at regular intervals. Google Home takes this a step further by letting you use a Live Album, which can automatically be populated by photos you take of specific people or pets.
3
Control Your TV Without a Remote

The TV remote control is a wonder of modern convenience, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. With a Google Home speaker and a Chromecast, you can cast whatever you’re watching to your TV and even turn the display on or off on certain televisions.

Amazon’s Fire TV Cube goes even further; its IR blaster lets you control Blu-ray players, cable boxes, and most of the other boxes in your living room. Sure, you might not need to use voice commands every time you want to adjust the volume, but turning everything off at night while you walk out of the room is handy.

2
Link to Smart Home Devices

Smart home devices are getting cheaper, more useful, and more widely available every day. You can control your lights, adjust the thermostat, or see who’s ringing the doorbell with internet-connected devices, but they all work better with a voice-controlled speaker.

If you have compatible devices, you can turn off your bedroom lights from under the covers, pull up a video of the front door from the display in your kitchen, or ask whether the air conditioning is turned on. Having a smart speaker in your home gives you a central hub to control your smart home, and changes the math on which devices might be worth purchasing.
1
Use Routines to Perform Multiple Tasks at Once

Both Amazon Echo and Google Home devices support a feature called Routines, which allows you to create a single voice command that performs multiple actions at once. For example, when it’s time for bed, you could create a routine that turns off your lights, turns off the TV, and starts playing some soothing music. Just tell your speaker “good night” and let your voice assistant take care of the rest.