Google Assistant/Home finally (mostly) works with personal library and speaker groups
This wasn’t a joke, there was no way I could find last week to get Google Home to play a song called Mayan Pilot from my library on a speaker group called House.
The issue was I could play a song from my library, or I could play on a speaker group, but I could not play a song from my library on a speaker group.
As of this weekend this finally works consistently for me with the command structure of “Play <songname> from my library on <speaker group name>” like it should.
I could not reliably get bands to play that are in my personal music library, however this may be because most of the MP3s I have are from the 90’s, ripped from CDs back in ye old days pre-auto tagging. Google Home also appears to be mishearing the band names quite a bit so that may be that.
Unexpected potential find – I have a speaker group called House. I’ve asked Google Assistant a number of times to play something on speaker group Home and it has either figured out that I’m stupid and played correctly, or perhaps it’s just still operating on speaker group House.
Earth shattering? No. But it’s nice to finally be able to use my Google Homes like I expected to be able to use them when I purchased them. Not that Google Play Music isn’t a great service, but man, you go looking for some alt rock from the 90’s and you’re going to run into some disappointment. Mayan Pilot by Splashdown being my current example. Great song, not on Play Music, and the YouTube versions sound a little meh when compared to my absurd bandwidth MP3s from 1998.
I really wish Google Home/Assistant would have some sort of back end change log. Finding these annoyances and then them being fixed has got me really feeling more like a beta tester for a product I thought was complete.
