Google Home is finally adding support for buttons

Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally Added support for buttons. Release notes for A Updated February 2 He mentioned that several new starting conditions for automations are now available, including “push a key or button.”

Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or control devices in your smart home, such as turning the lights on or off, opening and closing the blinds, turning on a Good Night scene, or starting the robot vacuum.

A great alternative to voice control and apps when you want to control multiple devices, smart buttons are often wireless and generally have several ways to press them: single press, double press, and long press, which means one button can do multiple things.

Most smart home platforms support using buttons to control connected devices, including Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and Home Assistant. With the arrival of Matter, the interoperability standard for connected devices, it’s even easier to control all your devices with buttons (called General switch In the matter of specifications).

However, it’s unfortunate that Google Home doesn’t have this functionality – yet. The release notes specify that the following functionality is now supported in the Google Home app (but not through Ask Home or Help Me Create, Google’s Gemini-powered automation features):

“A switch or button pressed**: For example, “When you double-click the switch…”, “When you press and hold the button on the dimmer…”, or “When you release the button…” **Available as a starter only:

Single or multiple press/long press/long press release

One of the reasons Google is finally making this move is because it was introduced recently New ‘material over thread’ appliances from IKEA. This includes $6 road trip, Wireless button comes in two forms: with two buttons or with a scroll wheel button.

Although smart buttons are extremely useful, until now they have been somewhat niche — mainly because they are relatively expensive ($20-$50) and mostly connected to proprietary ecosystems or hub-based protocols like Zigbee or Z-Wave. With Matter, the need for a dedicated hub to connect a button to your smart home platform is removed, and at $6, Ikea’s new buttons are very affordable.

This would open up the fun and functionality of the buttons to more smart home users. With IKEA’s vast user base potentially on edge now Embrace the smart homeGoogle needs to step up its support.

Google is introducing some other automation improvements with its latest update, including the ability to trigger automation when a robot vacuum is docked, when the humidity reaches a certain level, and when the battery or binary state changes (closed or open, connected or no contact, leaking or not leaking) of a device.

The February 2 release also claims to offer a “core fix” for the recurring “Video not available” error in the Google Home app when trying to play videos.