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GoogleNestTeam
Community Manager (Admin)
Community Manager (Admin)

Hey everyone,

 

We’re happy to share that we’re expanding Routines in the Google Home app to give you more control of the things you can automate in your home. 

 

With new starters, conditions and actions, you can now easily build and customize home automations that can make your home safer, your life easier, and your day more fun. These features are available to a small set of users today and will continue to roll out over the next few weeks.

 

With these updates you will be able to create home automations that start when your compatible smart devices do something, when you say something to Google Assistant, when it’s a specific time of the day, or at sunrise / sunset . For example, you can create:

  • A safety Routine called “lock up for the night” (see visuals below) that turns on your camera, locks the front door, and arms your security system every night at 9PM.
  • An energy-saving Routine that automatically turns off the garage light when no motion is detected in the garage for 15 minutes.*
  • A convenient Routine to welcome your visitors that turns on the Porch light at 75% brightness and plays a custom message on your smart speakers, whenever someone presses the doorbell.
  • Or, a fun party time Routine that plays your party playlist whenever you turn on disco lights, or when you say to Google Assistant “Hey Google! It’s party time.”

 

Keep reading to learn about the home automations you can create, and all the new capabilities available for your Routines. 

 

HHR.png

 

 

Routines for every member of your home

Google Home already allows you to create Personal Routines, which can only be edited and seen by the creator.  With the launch of these new capabilities, now, you can make Household Routines that work for everyone in your home. When you create a Household Routine, any member that you add to your household in the Google Home app can view, edit, run, activate, deactivate or delete it. Additionally, all home members can check when the Routine runs in the History view in the Google Home app.

 

What’s new

Below is a quick snapshot of the capabilities currently available with Household Routines. The current set of features is our first step to help users build powerful automations for their homes. We'll continue to add more devices, starters, conditions and actions so look out for those in the future. We'll also continue to onboard more partners on the automation platform later this year and next.

 

Starters:

Condition:

Actions:

  • Voice starter
  • Time starter
  • Sun events
  • Turn On / Off
  • Motion Sensor*
  • Thermostat mode
  • Lock a Smart Lock
  • Arm your Security System
  • Start / Stop a Smart Device 
  • Play / Pause / Stop media
  • Media Volume %
  • Media Input Selection
  • Doorbell Press

Time and day condition

  • Turn On / Off
  • Camera scheduling
  • Thermostat mode, thermostat temperature
  • Lock a Smart Lock
  • Arm a Security System
  • Start / Stop a Smart Device
  • Play media
  • Media Volume %
  • Media Input Selection


 

Starters

You’ve had the ability to start your Routines with your voice, a tap, or at a certain time of the day in your Google Home app, but now you can start your Household Routines when a compatible smart device changes state or does something. For example: when your motion sensor detects motion, or when someone presses your doorbell, then the porch lights turn on.*

 

Conditions

We currently support time conditions for all Routines. This allows you to start your Routine at certain times of the day and days of the week. For example, turn on my lights at sunset but only on weekdays (condition).

 

Actions

With so many potential Routines, here are a few example actions that you can combine with any of the starters and conditions:

  • Camera scheduling, lock and arm 
    • Example: At 9:00 PM every day, turn the outdoor camera on, lock the front door, and arm the security system.
  • Play media or adjust the volume
    • Example: When I say “Hey Google! It’s party time”turn up the living room speaker volume to 100% and play my party playlist.
  • Turn smart devices on/off
    • Example: When the living room lights turn on during weekends, turn on the Chromecast with Google TV and set the volume to 50%.

Frame@2x-4.png

 

 

 

Have advanced automation ideas and want more features?

As we invest into these capabilities of Routines, we understand that many of our advanced users want to create even more powerful and complex home automations. We are building a home automation script editor, which will offer our advanced users even greater customization with 100+ new features and capabilities based on your unique understanding of your home. Keep an eye on the community blog for more updates.

 

Feeling inspired to create a Routine of your own? We want to see it! 

Share your unique Routines in the community’s Home Automation forum under the category “Sharing an Automation”. Not only can you impress your fellow community members, earn Kudos, and start conversation, but we’ll also be on the lookout for our fave automations to feature in future blog posts! 

 

And on that note, be on the lookout for these features rolling out over the next few weeks. Be sure to visit the Home Automation forum  and join the discussions about home automations that can make you feel safer, make your day easier, and allow you to have more fun.

 

See you in the Home Automation forum!

Prafulla Rawal, Product Manager, Google Home

 

 

*Currently available with Philips Hue motion sensors. Devices must be added to your Home structure before they can be used in a Routine.

32 Comments
ryanmeehan
Community Member

Awesome updates! Does the "play media" action enable playing a specific channel from YouTube TV? I "ask" the Nest Hub to turn on my regional sports channel every night at 7 to watch the baseball game. Would be great to link that action to the time of day trigger so it could just come on automatically. 

 

Fanghoward
Community Member

Really nice.  Can't wait to get my hands on this. Finally we see some progress with Google ecosystem, and I love it. 

Now you just need to add starters based on device settings (for example: when the phone starts to wireless charging do x). 

pesciboi
Community Member

Does that mean there is a fix for my Ticwatch P3 - Nest door cam alerts no longer show a preview on my watch. It just says "open on phone". My partner's Apple watch has no issues with Nest preview notifications.

Htruong
Community Member

@ryanmeehan I believe you can already do this with Google Home routines today.

  1. Create a new routine with a time starter of 7pm
  2. Add a custom action (last option in the action drop down)
  3. Write in the current voice command you use with your Nest Hub
CFH2022
Community Member

Fantastic! We just started installing Cameras, Thermostats, and Doorbells but were surprised to find that automations were unavailable as previously unavailable.  We were going to return everything and look elsewhere, but now that automations are coming, we will keep it all.  

Is there a way to sign up early to try out the updates?  

Thanks again, 

 

Davnet999
Community Member

Progress.... what about logical If then or and not into the routine programing?   What about selling a quality inexpensive sensor to sell to help support the logic in Home routine scripts??  There should be a better dashboard of the current functioning routines... A way to test the routine..

Cathal_S
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

@Davnet999 

On the blog post linked below Google has said that they will be launching a script editor for routines early next year.

https://blog.google/products/google-nest/nest-fall-launch-2022/ 

 

Davnet999
Community Member

Actually.... Very Very surprised to see a 1.45 Trillion company as Google to have such a simple automation Home functionality... The Home application runs only a portion of the full function of their supposedly compatible product..  I end up going to the product app to run or configure advance features... Why is there not a group of different  inexpensive motion, sound,  frequency voice (Without the Hey Google yappy).??  Why isn't there a flow chart, script writing, simple language to design If, then, or else, with and , or results???  

Cathal_S
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

Hi again,

Home automation is still a very new technology that is constantly evolving.

I personally use the open source Home Assistant software for my advanced automations currently.
As this is a community forum supported by other users and community specialist's the best way of getting your thoughts, feedback or feature requests to the people that can make changes is by submitting feedback as detailed within the link below.

Feedback:
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7071494

 

PedroLiberal
Community Member

Please invest a little bit of time into setting up, or allowing, users to connect their google home into other services like home assistant or openHAB.

im currently trying to get the alarms from each google speaker into openHAB or node red, and there is no way to do this.

 

arundevidas
Community Member

How about controlling switches using humidity sensor values or temperature sensor values of particular area? Will  that work with new release? I did not see them in the trigger list.

 Also same for contact sensors?

 Regards

Arun

 

Beth7808
Community Member

I would really like to use a calendar entry to trigger a routine. I frequently have meetings a different times and I would love to be able to have an announcement and change the lights before the calendar event.

PedroLiberal
Community Member

Curious. I’ve received this option but I just see a switch (which is defined as a TV), a smart vaccum and the google speakers.

will you be rolling out more devices as time goes on or do I have a problem??

0B6F5481-61DF-4699-8D93-6BC899DBA6F2.png

 What do you think @GoogleNestTeam ??

DSC05
Community Member

I've managed to make an automation that turns on my hue plug, when my nest speaker plays media. But it works sadly only once after saving the automation. Am I doing something wrong or is anyone having the same problem? 

mg1234
Community Member

Hi There - in the coming updates to automation capabilities in the new app, it would be great to see a feature to allow for randomization of select lights in the house to turn on/off for a set duration when a trigger happens (e.g. when nest thermostat changes to eco mode, allow kitchen, dining and bedroom light to randomly turn on and off between 6pm and 11pm). This is a common security feature that makes it look like someone is home while you're away from the house. Companies like Lutron had this feature for their lights but it no longer works since google removed integration with nest devices. 

Thanks.

Tjm4
Community Member

How do I set a routine that when I come home after dark ( sunset) that certain lights in my house turn on?

I searched the web and read the forum and articles without any guidance how to do the simple trigger and action. I see that you can set conditions but I don't see anywhere in my home app where to set conditions. A user manual would be most helpful. 

 

Luckybaba2022
Community Member

I am around the world INFORMATION to work Google drive 

Tonycv51
Community Member

Hi any idea on when the camera scheduling will be available in the UK please.  My cameras are still not showing in routines

 

 

notescat
Community Member

Hi,

I use Apple Home automation to power off the heater when me and my family are out. Sadly I can't setup on Google Home.

I hope some day leaving and arrival automation on Google Home will can do that.

Jordi

EricX
Community Member

I'm fairly disappointed with the Preview Home app.  I had a routine for working from home that would kick off with the time, the weather and my calendar and then would play the radio.  Later in the day, it would give me reminders at specific times and at the end of the day, it would have Assistant stop playing any music.

 

However it seems that the Home App now requires for media to be LAST in a routine... That's disappointing.  Why?

 

I can't even create a "Radio" routine because it must have media as the end.  So the music couldn't end automatically by an ending action.

 

Screenshot_20221230_154057_Google.jpg

justelorise
Community Member

👋🏾 I’m new here. My new home has the Nest doorbell and thermostat so how do I get access to control and monitor them?

Tonycv51
Community Member

Any update on being able to set routines for cameras in the UK  I have the preview switched on but still no ability to do this ?

GSelvage
Community Member

How do I find a open door sensor that will work with Google? This has been un-believably hard to find. All I want is a routine that when this door opens, it will turn on a light that is on a smart switch.

sulvo
Community Member

Any word on timing for the home automation script editor? This will be a game changer if it materialises...

@GoogleNestTeam 

MasterOfObvious
Community Member

Still no ability to trigger custom Assistant actions on Household Away and Home routines! Argh!

The single most useful routines are those that are triggered by presence sensing. All other routines allow us to chain custom actions in response to commands - but not presence sensing!

I appreciate the updates, but this one area is such a major disappointment.

 

CFH2022
Community Member

Agreed this is what I have been waiting for as well. I thought it was coming based on comments at the end of 2022. 

MasterOfObvious
Community Member

Yep. It feels like Google is either trying to make presence stuff only work for Google devices, or they just don’t bother to actually use their own stuff.

alik1006
Community Member

So I am not sure I understand... can I write smth like "If Smart Sensor Humidity < 40 Turn On Smart Plug"?

Douglaswomack
Community Member

Isn’t this problem for the engineers of creating the Google home devices? And not the customers if it’s the customers I feel like I should be getting paid for this. These problems should be worked out before they were put on the shelf in stores or for the customer to buy. I am not going to be your test goat.

Tonycv51
Community Member

In the snapshot above it clearly states that camera scheduling is current functionality. I have the preview switched on but over a year later this "current" functionally for camera scheduling is still not available

Tonycv51
Community Member

So bizarrely I've been messing round today and I can now add the indoor wired cameras to automations in the home app. This was on a new automation and think I'd been trying to add them from time to time on a existing automation that didn't let me add the cameras as they didn't appear

 

jgernaat1987
Community Member

I'd like to see a feature (starter/condition) for automations in script editor based of weather conditions (for example: don't run thermostat/AC-unit automation when outdoor temp is <x> degrees)