Google Assistant & Smart Home devices

As I bid adieu to the school where I first started teaching as a trained teacher, I was presented with some pretty cool tech gadgets as farewell gifts. This must be because they know that I love dabbling with new technology and that I would be committing myself to working on educational technology in the years to come.

I received a Wireless Charger and a Google Home Mini set from my Mathematics and English Department respectively. I am absolutely grateful for the thoughtful gifts. They were items that I would have bought for myself someday just to try them out and see if they could be useful in my role as an educator. I have always wanted to experiment with the Google Assistant especially since I have been an Android user all the while. I had seen how Google rolled out visual cards and other exciting features for its GA.

The Google Home applications as well as wirelessly connected devices were also pretty cool. I could imagine a futuristic home or home-office with various household appliances easily activated through voice commands or action words thanks to Natural Language Processing and advancements in Aritifcial Intelligence. The main gripe would be the privacy issues relating to the devices. That could possibly be the main obstacle preventing the use of such smart devices in schools too. You can have a sense of how this would work from the gif below.

Here are some screenshots of the Google Home app and one can easily see the functions and potential of the devices that can be connected too.

Speaker + Lamp connected

before linking Spotify

adding supported devices

It seems that even without trying too hard to speak in an American or British accent, I was able to activate the Google Home mini to play for me calming songs through Spotify and also to adjust the brightness or even switch off the Wi-fi connected LED lamp. I wonder how great a device like that could be in class considering that it is connected to Google APIs and can also be installed with a custom-made chatbot like the one I made using DialogFlow. That is also why I decided to buy a JBL 310GA during the Singles Day 11.11 sale as it had compatible functions with Google Assistant too.

My hope is that more devices would be compatible and more developers or content creators and providers would be willing to contribute and make products or services which sync well with the smart devices to make Smart living a norm for life.