All Google Home Does is Talk, Talk, Talk (and not email or message me)

Google Home is smart. You can ask it who the leader of Liechtenstein is and it will tell you Adrian Hasler is the Prime Minister. Ask it who the stars of I, Spy were and it will tell you the cast included Robert Culp, Bill Cosby and twelve others. Ask it how much the Sun weighs and it will answer 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms.

But Google Home doesn’t communicate except by talking, and that’s a huge limitation. It won’t email you, or text you. That significantly decreases its utility.

What did you say to me?

Google Home records the things you ask it and the replies it gives in the Google Home app, but good luck finding that list. Here’s the home screen of the Google Home app:

You’ll notice there’s no “This is what Google Home has heard and said,” button. You might reasonably think tapping on the Living Room Speaker would bring up details on it, but all that gets you is a volume control.

Instead, tap on the little person icon in the lower right corner.

Tapping the little person icon gets you this display, but we’re not there yet. Note the item at the bottom, “My activity.” This is a scrolling list, so it’s possible on an iPhone with a smaller display, this entry wouldn’t even be visible without scrolling first. Tapping on “My activity” gets you to the actual display of the things you’ve said to Google Home, and the things it’s said to you.

Here’s the activity display for Google Home. This is a simple reverse chronological list, and the search is fairly primitive: it seems to be whole-word matches only, with none of affordances available on google.com. You can also find this list in a browser at myactivity.google.com, which I didn’t know existed until I saw the url-looking heading for this display.

In several weeks of using Google Home, it has mentioned this feature exactly once.

Shop ’til you drop

Google Home works quite well for creating a shopping list. You can say, “Add strawberries, raspberries, and bananas to my shopping list” and Google is happy to comply. Make things more complex by saying, “Add chocolate, milk, and yogurt to my shopping list” and (in my experience) Google will add “chocolate milk” to the list. That’s an understandable mistake, although I was puzzled that saying, “Add baking chocolate, milk, and ice cream to my shopping list” results in an entry for “baking chocolate milk.”

Then there’s the question of where the list exists, and again you’re left searching. As with the Activity display, you have to open the Google Home app, then tap on the little person/account icon, and then the shopping list is toward the bottom of the list of options, just above “My Activity”.

Disconnected

Ask Google Home how to make a goulash, and it will happily recite a recipe for you. It will even recite the ingredients for you one by one, although it sometimes has minor glitches — for example, saying that the recipe calls for “One L B ground beef.”

But if you need to go to the store to get the ingredients, you’re out of luck. Say, “email me the ingredient list,” and Google cheerfully replies, “Sorry, I don’t understand.” Assuming you know about Google Home’s shopping list feature, you can tell it to add the ingredients to your shopping list, and it will say that it has. But in my experience, it doesn’t actually add the ingredients to the list.

If you want to access the recipe in a more usable form, you can go to the Activity List as shown here. If you tap on the blue text “how do you make goulash” Google Home will open a web search.

Here’s what that search result page looks like. The recipe Google Home speaks about is the one from Delish, so for now at least it’s reasonably-positioned in the app, but it’s not highlighted in any way, and an algorithm change, or just an update to the recipe page itself, could change that at any time.

Interestingly, tapping on Send to Google Home seems to cue up the recipe for speech again — see the visually-broken message at the bottom of this image.

Other Options

Google Home shouldn’t just be able to email me; I can say, “How long will it take me to drive to Ballard?” and Google will reply, taking traffic into account. But if I continue with, “Okay, email Bob Roberts that I’m going to be fifteen minutes late,” this again elicits a cheerful, “Sorry, I don’t understand.” If you ask for directions, Google Home will give you an abbreviated overview and then say that you can get detailed directions on your phone — with no option to get those directions in your Maps application by asking Google Home for them.

If you tap the blue text “how long would it take to drive to Portland right now” Google Home displays this, which is neither the Google Maps app nor the Apple Maps app.

Interestingly, while Google Home seems completely unaware of the concept of email, it does understand the concept of texts — and the fact that it isn’t set up to send them: “Text Katerina that I’m on my way,” elicits a response of “Sorry, I can’t send texts yet.” On the other hand, “Email Katerina that I’m on my way,” again gives the “I don’t understand” response.

Recommendations

There are a myriad use cases that require Google Home to be able to do more than talk. Writing this article, for example, would have benefitted from the ability to say, “Hey Google, find large images of Google Home Mini on google.com and send me links to them.”

Fundamentally, a voice user interface benefits from the addition of what amounts to other display mechanisms to augment the output speech. Google Home should take advantage of all of them. Therefore:

1. Redesign the Google Home app to clearly provide direct access to the history of commands.
2. Prefix speech commands with “Email me” or postfix with “Email me that” to send results to a predefined email address.
3. Prefix speech commands with “Text me” or postfix with “Text me that” to send results to a predefined email address.
4. Prefix speech commands with “Email <contact name>” or “text <contact name>” or postfix with “Email that to <contact name>” or “text that to <contact name>” to send to anyone in my contact list. For those not in my contact list, allow on-the-fly additions, something like “I don’t have a Bob Roberts in your contact list, do you have a phone number for them?” “Yes, it’s 213 555–1212” “Got it, I’ll remember next time.”
5. Allow direct commands for email and text : “email my wife that I’m picking up dinner”, “text my father happy birthday”.
6. For things like directions, link directly into native apps — Apple Maps or Google Maps as appropriate.
7. For things like recipes, store a link to the actual item in the Google Home app.