With the introduction of the Home Mini and Home Max, there are now three types of Assistant-powered hardware from Google. The Assistant is already very capable, but that isn't stopping the team from continuing to add useful features. At Google's event earlier in the month we learned that Google Home can now easily find your phone, and it also recently added the ability to turn off your Chromecast-connected TV.
The latest addition to Google Home's feature set is a new type of timer. It's already possible to set timers for things like cooking or game time, but we can now also set a sleep timer that will stop your music playing at a given point in time. This is great if you're like me and listen to music as you nod off to sleep.
According to the Google Home Help page, there are a few different ways you can start a sleep timer:
Set a sleep timer
“Set a sleep timer for 30 minutes”“Set a sleep timer at 9:30”
Set sleep timer by duration
"Play music/artist/genre/playlist for <duration>”“Stop music/artist/genre/playlist in <duration>”“Stop playing in <duration>”
Set sleep timer by time
"Play music/artist/genre/playlist until <time>""Stop music/artist/genre/playlist at <time>"“Stop playing at <time>”
Update a sleep timerNote: Creating a new sleep timer will replace the existing sleep timer.
Use any of the above voice commands
Cancel music timerNote: This only cancels the music timer. Your music will continue playing.
“Cancel the sleep timer”
Ask about remaining time on timer
“How much time is left on the sleep timer?”
This is apparently a feature that many users have requested on the Google Home Help forum, and it's easy to think of a few situations where it will come in handy. It's another string to the Assistant's bow, and now we wait to see which capability Google will add next. Let us know in the comments what you think is still missing.