The Google Home Mini is one of the original smart speakers from Google’s six-speaker line up. Even though it’s a few years old, it’s still a mighty little speaker that packs a big punch, and there are probably at least a few things you didn’t know it could do.
The streaming service has partnered with Google to give away free Google Home Mini speakers to all new and existing subscribers through November 15 (or while supplies last).
What is the Google Home Mini?
Released in late 2017, the Google Home Mini is the first iteration of Google’s most compact smart speaker that features Google Assistant. If you’re an Alexa user, it’s basically like the equivalent of Amazon’s Echo Dot.
Recently, Google launched a second-generation version of its beloved and compact smart speaker, the Nest Mini. There aren’t a ton of differences between the two Google speakers, but the Nest Mini does come with a faster Google Assistant and boasts better sound quality. However, the Google Home Mini isn’t to be overlooked, especially since it’s almost always on sale for around $40 or less.
Thanks to its small design, the Google Home Mini is a good option for apartment dwellers and college students who live in dorm rooms. It’s also a great place to start if you’re new to the world of smart home tech since it’s easy to set up, and also because Google Assistant is more conversational than Amazon Alexa.
What can the Google Home Mini do?
From using your voice to shut off the lights, unlocking the front door with just a tap, smart home devices, like the Google Home Mini, can make life a little easier.
Here are 15 things you probably didn’t know Google Home Mini can do.
1. Make your smart home even smarter
Google works with more than 30,000 smart devices from over 3,500 different brands. Many smart home devices can be controlled using Google Assistant so you can ask your Google Home Mini to dim the lights, control your thermostat, lock your doors, turn on the news, or change the volume on your television. You can even start your robot vacuum and dictate which rooms in the house you want audio to play in.
Easter Egg (the just-for-fun commands sure to bring you a laugh) #1: “Hey, Google, wubba lubba dub dub.”
2. Find your lost phone
Sure, Google can call (and hang up on) anyone from your contacts list with a few simple commands, but that’s not the full beauty of the Google Home Mini call feature. If your phone has disappeared, there’s no reason to waste hours searching for it. Instead, call out an “OK, Google, find my phone.”
Your Google Home Mini will clarify, “OK, should I call the number ending in XXXX?” Once you confirm, you should hear your phone ringing wherever it’s been lost. Bonus: If you have an Android, your Google Home Mini will make sure it rings even if you left it on silent.
Easter Egg #2: “Hey, Google, self-destruct.”
3. Create a routine
Picture this: You wake up and say to your Google Home Mini, “Hey, Google, good morning,” and it responds by automatically starting your coffee and then telling you the day’s weather, the traffic you can expect to encounter on the way to work, the biggest news headlines for the day, and a reminder of what you have on your calendar.
Through your Google Assistant app, available for download on iOS and Android devices, this routine (and several others, to include “Bedtime,” “I’m Leaving,” “I’m Home,” “Let’s Go to Work,” and, “Let’s Go Home,”) can be established so that your Google Home Mini knows exactly what you want, day after day.
Easter Egg #3: “Hey, Google, inconceivable.”
4. Make an announcement the whole house can hear
The beauty of having more than one Google Assistant-enabled speaker throughout your home is that when you have an announcement you want to make to your entire brood, you don’t have to yell it down the halls. This is as simple as saying, “OK, Google, broadcast that breakfast is ready,” or, “OK, Google, broadcast that it’s time to go.” You can even use your phone to broadcast to anyone who may be home that you’re on your way there, too.
Easter Egg #4: “Hey, Google, crystal ball.”
Read more: How to reset your Google Home Mini
![]() 5. Pull up your favorite playlists
As a smart speaker, your Google Home Mini can connect to your Spotify, Pandora, YouTube music, or TuneIn playlists to keep your space jamming all day long. You can request songs by artist, album, even by lyrics you may recall off the top of your head. And if, for some reason, you don’t have accounts with any of those, Google Home Mini will still happily provide you with free playlists from YouTube music (they just aren’t quite as customizable). And music isn’t all Google Home Mini will play for you. You can also request white noise or the day’s news.
Easter Egg #5: “Hey, Google, make me a sandwich.”
6. Entertain the kids for days
Equipped with a library of knock-knock jokes and animal noises, the Google Home Mini can provide your kids with endless fun. Just team them to say, “OK, Google,” and they’ll be set for hours of enjoyment. Especially if you start with, “Hey, Google, did you fart?”
You can ask Google to tell them a story, play a game, or beatbox for them. And with responses to commands like, “Hey, Google, clean my room,” and “Hey, Google, what’s that smell?” they’re sure to be rolling. You can even now set character alarms for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Lego City, Lego Life, or Lego friends. All you have to do is say, “Hey, Google, set a Lego Friends alarm for 8 am” and your Google Home Mini will take it from there.
However, it’s a good idea to fine tune the device’s restricted content controls to your liking before letting your kids loose with the Google Home Mini.
Easter Egg #6: “Hey, Google, I am your father.”
7. Set a sleep timer
If you like falling asleep to music or white noise, but you don’t want it to be playing all night, just say, “OK, Google, set a sleep timer for one hour,” once the sound is playing. Don’t let the name fool you, though; the sleep timer doesn’t just have to be for nighttime, and there’s no set amount of time you need to stick to.
You can also use it as a guideline to yourself for how long you need to work on a project that day, as a timer for when you need to get out of the shower, or as a way to keep your pets company while you’re gone.
Easter Egg #7: “Hey, Google, my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.”
8. Speak your language.
Your Google Home Mini is well-versed in a number of languages. And it can even be set to respond to two languages at a time including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Adding a second language can be accomplished through the Google Home app on your smartphone or tablet. Google Home Mini can also act as your translator when you say, “How do you say [word] in [language]?”
Easter Egg #8: “Hey, Google, I’m naked.”
9. Get in shape
Not only can Google Home Mini integrate with your Fitbit, providing updates on your vitals and tracking your workouts and caloric intake throughout the day, it can also give you workout tips and exercise ideas.
Additionally, Google Home Mini is equipped to answer any questions you may have about the caloric, sugar, protein or nutrient content in any number of foods you may be eating, or considering eating. The tiny Google-enabled device can also help you find healthy recipes, create your shopping list, and guide you through making those recipes in the kitchen.
Easter Egg #9: “Hey, Google, it’s my birthday.”
10. Keep your day moving
With your Google Home Mini, you can keep track of your daily calendar, any meetings or appointments you may have coming up, and any reminders you may have set for yourself. For instance, you can ask Google to remind you to pick up milk or to remember where you hid the password for your computer. Your Google Home Mini can also help you manage connecting with people in different time zones by letting you know what time it is wherever they may be. And if you’re worried about losing track of time yourself, you can always set an alarm for anything you may have coming up—to include waking up every morning to your favorite playlist.
Easter Egg #10: “Hey, Google, it’s not my birthday.”
11. Help you plan a vacation
If you’re itching for a trip somewhere far away, Google Home Mini can help get you there. Just start by asking, “OK, Google, tell me about flights to [your preferred destination].”
From there, Google has hooked up with several hotel booking sites (to include Expedia, Priceline and Choice Hotels) to help you book rooms wherever you may be traveling. https://mgbcdix.weebly.com/descargar-spotify-premium-apk-2018-para-pc.html. You can even ask about commute times, local traffic or weather information, and for directions to anywhere you may want to visit.
Easter Egg #11: “Hey, Google, what is your quest?”
12. Do your math homework.
You may not want to let the kids know this, but Google can definitely answer their basic math questions—and yours! Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, counting, measurement and currency conversions, even fractions; your Google Home Mini can do it. You can also ask Google to flip a coin, roll a die, or choose a random number.
Easter Egg #12: “Hey, Google, sing a song.”
13. Lighten the mood.
If it’s been a rough day, consider calling out, “OK, Google, tell me something good.” The result will be a happy news story sure to warm your heart and bring a smile to your face. You can also play games with Google. Try, “Hey, Google, I’m feeling lucky.” Or, “OK, Google, Mad Libs,” for something light, fun, and stress-relieving.
Easter Egg #13: “Hey, Google, up up down down left right left right B A start.”
14. Google all your questions
This may come as a shock to you, but your Google Home Mini is equipped with quite the impressive search engine. Never again do you have to sit around wondering who starred in that movie, what local Italian restaurants you have to choose from, or how to find a good heating specialist nearby. Google can find it all for you. And if you’re just bored, ask Google to surprise you. You’ll end up with a random fact you’ve probably never heard before.
Easter Egg #14: “Hey, Google, set phasers to kill.”
15. Stay quiet at night
Your Google Home Mini is a pretty awesome little tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s infallible. If you’ve had it set up for a few weeks now, it’s possible you’ve been woken up by unexpected notifications or an alarm that was much louder than expected. You can prevent this by setting up night mode through your Google Home App, available for download on iOS and Android devices.
There, you have three options: setting a time frame for night mode to go into effect, putting your Google Home Mini into Do Not Disturb mode, or adjusting the nightly brightness and max volume.
Easter Egg #15: “Hey, Google, winter is coming.”
Google Home Mini and privacy concerns
With stories of hackers gaining entry into smart home security cameras, privacy concerns are at the forefront of many consumer minds these days, and rightfully so. Melody music app. And, if you have a smart home speaker in your home already, you may already be mindful of how your information is shared and your ability to control privacy settings on a particular device.
Major tech companies like Apple and Amazon have addressed privacy concerns over using audio recordings as part of their respective voice-assistant quality evaluation processes—and Google did the same in September 2019.
Google published a blog about how the company is working toward protecting user privacy as it relates to Google Assistant. But, the company underlined that they do not 'retain your audio recordings' and have never done so.
So, what does it mean for you? As far as the Google Home Mini is concerned, Google won’t automatically store your conversations with Google Assistant unless you give the device permission to do so.
https://mgbcdix.weebly.com/spotify-computer-download-quality.html. On the bottom of the device, you’ll find a toggle switch that turns the mic on and off. So if you’re concerned about a sensitive conversation being recorded, just manually power off the microphone.
Get the Google Home Mini at Walmart for $39
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Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change over time.
Related contentSpotify And Google Mini
For years, I've had a bit of a digital pen pal.
His name is Kevin. He loves music, 'Coffee Table Jazz' in particular. He owns an Amazon Echo, through which he listens to his lovely, soothing John Coltrane trumpet croons. He doesn't often listen during the day, but at night the tunes come alive — probably while he's also hand rolling linguine next to a glass of a full-bodied cabernet. (Or at least, that's what I imagined.)
SEE ALSO: Amazon may be building a new brain for Alexa
I know all of this because Kevin and I have been linked at the hip (digitally) for years, all through a connected Spotify account. Every so often, while I'm listening to music on the app, it'll stop abruptly and I'll get a message that has become the bane of my existence: Now Playing on Kevin's Echo.
My name is not Kevin. Nor do I own an Echo. Nor do I frequent the music of Miles Davis (I mean I like it, but I do not care to listen while I am contorting my body like a Tetris figure to fit in a crowded New York City subway car). Yet, this kept happening. Some dude named Kevin kept hopping into my account and hijacking it. Did I even know any Kevins?
yo @Spotify you wanna tell me why some dude named Kevin keeps hoppin up in my account and playing shit on his echo pic.twitter.com/mW0KSdKHqw
— Brian De Los Santos (@B_Delos) September 7, 2017
It'd happen everywhere. When I was at home. When I was walking the streets of Manhattan. While I was driving down the coast of California without cell reception. As I soared 30,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, with no access to Wi-Fi. It felt like Kevin was the one person I could never escape, an irritating grade school bully whose sole purpose in life was to hit pause on my Spotify as soon as I hit play.
At first, sure, it was a subtle annoyance. A #firstworldproblem, if you may. But as a customer of Spotify Premium, it was more annoying than anything to be paying for something that failed to work. And it kept happening, and happening, and happening. Over the course of years.
It felt like Kevin was the one person I could never escape.
I'd assumed it was someone in my apartment building whose account somehow got entangled with mine, or a random dude in North Dakota who had no idea what he was doing. Or maybe it was Russia, who knows. I did everything I could think of to make it stop. I changed my password. I dug into my devices menu and disconnected from all of them. I revoked access from all apps connected to my account. I even had Spotify customer service reset it.
Nothing worked. No matter what I did, Kevin was there, punking me with the dulcet tones of a muted trumpet.
I later realized I was not the only person with this problem. There were multiple posts on Spotify's community forum detailing this very problem, all positing solutions of varying success with no explicit fix. People had tried changing passwords, disconnecting and resetting accounts, enabling two-factor authorization. Nothing they tried worked.
What is this bullshit that won't go away and keeps hijacking my @Spotify account
I've revoked access to all other devices, changed my password, and still I'm getting this crap This might actually make me switch to Apple Music pic.twitter.com/YdMN4numyW
— Mike Murphy (@mcwm) February 11, 2018
Eventually, I realized Kevin had won. There was no way of getting rid of him. So I gave in. When I noticed Kevin was listening to the account at a time I didn't really need it, I let him have it. I never listened to music at night, when he often jammed to his jazz. When my headphones went silent on a crowded subway car, I didn't even check my phone — I already knew what it was going to say. I started listening to podcasts. I even became, in a way, fond of Kevin, or at least for his disregard for authority and sheer audacity to highjack another person's Spotify subscription.
Instead of fighting his interference on Spotify, I became wildly obsessed with figuring out who this Kevin was. It dawned on me that if Kevin could take over my account, it had to also work the other way around. His Echo did, after all, appear on my computer. So there had to be a way I could beam music to it. And if there was a way to beam music to it, there might also be a way to communicate. A sonic message in a bottle, if you will.
One day, while at work, I tried.
It became a group effort to a cohort of coworkers who — after hearing my tale — became as invested in the task as I was. We huddled around my desk as I attempted to play virtual DJ from afar. I knew he was near his Echo because he'd already gone back and forth with me a few times that morning, taking over the account.
At first, I wanted to be funny, but then I thought it'd be more helpful to be clear with my intent. I played 'Who Are You?' by The Who.
I knew it'd worked when I saw that he'd paused the song about 5 seconds into it. I tried again. This time it was 'What's Your Name?' by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
In my three year war with Kevin, I'd found a way to shift the tables.
He listened for 5 more seconds, then stopped it.
I finally had the upper hand. In my three year war with Kevin, I'd found a way to shift the tables. I found it comical to think that Kevin might just be lounging around in his three-bedroom suburban cottage or in Russia or wherever, and his Echo would randomly turn on to bump some tunes. After all these years, maybe I had a bit more pent-up rage than I thought — all stoked with the help of some devious colleagues.
So, I got a little carried away.
I played 'I Know What You Did Last Summer,' by Shawn Mendes. He listened for 5 seconds.
'Never Gonna Give You Up,' by Rick Astley. 18 seconds. (Yes, you're damn right I rickrolled him.)
'I Will Always Love You,' by Whitney Houston. 21 seconds.
'Kevin,' by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. 4 seconds.
'All Star,' by Smash Mouth. 6 seconds.
https://mgbcdix.weebly.com/spotify-memory-usage-mac.html. 'All Star,' by Smash Mouth, round two. 4 seconds.
We found the experience enjoyable enough to send a few tweets.
Someone named Kevin is playing @B_Delos 's Spotify on *his* echo. Which means we can also DJ. So far we've chosen Rick Astley, Smash Mouth, and Macklemore..
— Alex Hazlett (@ahazlett) February 2, 2018
I will uncover WHO this KEVIN is, one Rick Roll at a time https://t.co/FPkSzHNoeK
— Brian De Los Santos (@B_Delos) February 2, 2018
Spotify Random Album
I didn't think much about it before halting my antics to run into a work meeting a few minutes later. I figured nothing would come of it beyond a handful of laughs — but maybe, just maybe Kevin would finally be conscious that there was someone else hiding in between his playlists.
That was until a friend I went to grad school with tagged me in this Facebook status.
Spotify Free Google Mini Random Music Playlist
Turns out, I KNOW KEVIN. We'd gone to grad school together at Northwestern in 2014. We'd been close friends while in school (for a class assignment, I actually profiled him), but after I left Chicago more than two years ago, we'd fallen out of touch. I couldn't remember how the two of us would have become digitally intertwined, or when it would have happened. But the sheer oddity of it all struck me as nothing short of improbable.
Appropriately, I conveyed this:
As fate would have it, Kevin still lived in Chicago. And just a few days after I'd stumbled upon this realization, I was taking a trip to the Windy City to reunite with a select group of old classmates who hadn't been back in years. I shot Kevin a text, and we both agreed to meet up at a party to talk over just how absurd the whole thing was.
Turns out, Kevin had a very plausible explanation. He remembered a night I had visited a few years back. After a night of brews, I'd crashed on his couch before I was set to leave to the airport. I connected my account to his Echo since I was a Premium user, which, apparently, was the only way you could listen to the music on the device. He remembered this, in particular, he said, because I was being super dramatic about the whole thing (which doesn't sound like me, but actually sounds a lot like me).
Kevin said he had no idea that all this time he'd been stealing my Spotify. It never prompted him with an alert or told him that another user on the account was also trying to listen to music. And I couldn't ever remember, for the life of me, connecting to his device.
'Well, didn't you think it was weird that when your music stopped and I'd take it back over?' I asked.
'No, I just thought it was the Echo. Or Amazon. Fucking Bezos,' he said, shaking his fist at the sky.
All of this still made no sense to me, since every time I'd contacted Spotify they'd told me they'd reset my account on every device I'd owned. That was always their fix. It'd work for a few weeks and then all of the sudden I'd be greeted with the message that my music was playing elsewhere all over again. I'd tried everything, over and over again. But it wasn't until Kevin manually deleted my account off his Echo that I was finally free. That was the only fix.
After all this, we embraced, took a photo in the name of content, and called it a day.
Then I threw Kevin's Echo out the window.
Spotify Random Playlist
(Not really, but I should have.)
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