The Honeywell Lyric.
Chris Monroe/CNET
“Hey Google, turn up the temperature.”
If you have the always-listening Google Home on your countertop, you now have more options if you want to make your home smarter. Previously, you could talk to the Google Home and adjust the temperature with the Nest Learning Thermostat. Now, the Google Assistant built into the Home also works with Honeywell thermostats.
In addition to Honeywell, the Google Home launched its support of Belkin WeMo smart plugs today — an integration announced in December. In total, the Google Assistant built into the Home now works with Belkin, Honeywell, and the four platforms it launched with — Nest, SmartThings, Philips Hue and IFTTT.
That’s still well behind Amazon’s assistant Alexa. Alexa is built into the always-listening Amazon Echo and has thousands of skills, including dozens of partnerships with smart home gadgets and platforms. The Home is quite similar to the Echo, but the Echo has been around for two years and has used its head start to gain an impressive list of features.
Still, the Home is slowly but surely adding to its own list of smart home capabilities. Today’s announcement also hinted that smart home controls could be coming to the Google Pixel soon — the Pixel packs the same Google Assistant inside of a smartphone, but with slightly different capabilities.
In December, Google announced it was expanding Weave — its proprietary language that smart-home devices can use to talk to each other. That announcement listed Belkin, Honeywell, Lifx, Wink, TP-Link and First Alert as companies that would be adopting Weave. Since Belkin and Honeywell now work with the Home, that list could be a good preview of the Assistant’s next integrations.
