These days, you can control most of your smart home using only your voice — Google Assistant lets you adjust your bed, mow the lawn, open your closets, start your Xbox, control your TV, and so much more. Routers and networks are the latest new addition to the Assistant's library of natively supported actions, allowing for things like reboots, software updates, and parental controls on third-party networking devices.

On top of these, you also have access to more advanced functions such as "enabling the guest network and reporting network-specific information such as the current internet throughput rates." While it's fairly obvious what routers are, Google defines networks as "a group of router nodes or a mesh network controlled as one entity rather than as individual devices," so in essence, you can control the same set of options on both routers and networks.

Another noteworthy action is action.devices.commands.GetGuestNetworkPassword, which is the underlying code for an order that generates a QR code for your guest Wi-Fi password when you own Google Wifi routers. Hopefully, the addition of this string means we'll soon be able to ask third-party hardware for these credentials, too, as Google currently limits that feature to its own smart displays only.

As always, device manufacturers have to take action to enable these native Assistant commands, so it might take a while until we see third-party routers taking advantage of all of these features. It's also possible that certain manufacturers have already allowed Assistant voice control via their own integrations, but the native support for routers and networks means that you soon won't have to preface orders with "talk to [device name] and do [action]."

It's currently unclear if you can restart your router via voice when you're not connected to the internet, but with the company recently opening an offline SDK, the possibility to allow some router commands without a connection doesn't seem to be too outlandish.

Source: Google