If you have a few Google Home speakers littered around the house, Google is making it easier to move your music between rooms.
It’s all thanks to a new feature known as Stream Transfer, which lets you beam whatever album, playlist, or track is currently playing on one Google Home speaker to any other Google Home, Nest, or Chromecast-enabled gadget in your house.
Crucially, this lets you throw the music around to different speakers in the home, so that your music follows you around as you move between rooms.
For example, if you’ve finished cooking and want to keep listening to your new favourite album in the dining room, you can now ask Google to “move the music to the dining room,” to get the chatty AI assistant to silence the kitchen speakers and wake-up the sound system in the dining room without missing a beat.
Until now, if you wanted to expand the reach of whatever track you were listening to, you’d have to add the additional speakers within the Home app – or start playing to a group of speakers you’ve previously set-up. But while adding extra speakers would bring the tunes to additional rooms in the house… it would also leave your music blasting out in the room you’ve just left. It wasn’t a seamless transfer of music.
It was more just synchronising different Google Assistant-powered speakers around the house to play the same track.
If you haven’t already assigned rooms to your speakers, it’s well worth taking the time to trudge through that admin task in the Home app to take full advantage of the new feature. If Google doesn’t know where your speaker is located, you’ll have to state the name of the device to transfer music.
In our experience, that’s a lot harder to remember than simply stating: “OK Google, move music to the living room.”
If you get a little shy about barking orders to the Google Assistant, the same functionality has now been added to the Google Home app.
The feature can also be used to sling videos between a Chromecast HDMI dongle and a Nest Hub smart display, for example. If you have multiple Chromecasts you’ll be able transfer whatever binge-worthy box set you’re watching from the living room to the bedroom, too.
Unfortunately, Google hasn’t yet included the ability to beam music from your Google Assistant-enabled speakers to your Android smartphone. So, the dream of being able to transfer your playlist to your smartphone as you switch-off the lights and walk out of the door remains just that, for now.
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