Living with The Google Home Mini REVIEW
737 views · Published 12 January 2018 · 4:31 · Indexed 20 September 2026
Channel: Jimmy Tries World · 2018 · Science & Technology
A year ago, I was a firm believer that a “smart” assistant, was a “dumb” choice. What more could you want when you already had one on your phone that does what you need? Why bother getting a Google Home mini? Well times have changed, and we can all agree, I was the dumb one. A smart assistant is useful. And here’s why. Let’s get started. The smart assistant I’ve personally got with me is the google home mini, a great budget option to get started with for all the fancy features. It’s shaped like a nice bulge-y hockey puck and has nice fabric on top and a rubbery base, I’m assuming to prevent it from sliding around. You change the volume of it by tapping the left side to turn it down or the right side to turn it up. It doesn’t take up much room and can really fit anywhere. It easily connects to many different smart home devices like, Philips hue lights, nest thermostats, and a Chromecast. It has many features that a typical speaker has, like, playing music wirelessly, and uhhh… talking to you? That’s what separates this from other speakers, its knowledge and ability to respond to your commands. You can do pretty much do everything that is supported by its bigger brother, the google home. Like slave it around and make it play your Spotify playlist, or yell at it to open YouTube on your Chromecast, and best of all, she sings you happy birthday when you ask for it. And… wait for it… even if it’s not actually your real birthday. That’s the pinnacle of technology. Fake birthday songs. The reason why this thing is great is not how it behaves as just a quick google fact-checking machine, but how it interacts with other smart devices. For example, the Chromecast, a device inside google’s own ecosystem works really well with the home mini. Here’s some demonstrations of some of the home mini’s voice commands. “hey, google, play the latest upload from VideogameDunkey”. “Hey, google, pause the video”. “Hey Google, play music from Spotify”. “Hey Google, am I funny”? There’s so many different things you can ask it that you just can’t fit it all in a video, it just requires finding out what they are. Now those are the good things about it, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any bad. For one, speaker quality is a little lacking, I don’t blame them too much for this, since this is just a $50 product. Second, Google home support is kind of convoluted. With so many devices saying they “support” smart assistants, you’d have to look into them to see WHICH smart assistant they support. Basically, smart assistants don’t like it if you try to cheat on them. There’s also an issue with some basic commands I found. For example, when I say, “Hey Google, Play the video” while in Hulu, it actually switched my Chromecast to YouTube instead of just resuming my Parks and Rec, binging marathon. Yet, when I say, “Resume the video” it works fine. It’s minor annoyances like these that get to you. Third party support is a mixed bag, it may be good or bad depending on the device or app. Overall what would I say about the google home mini? It’s good. I don’t think it’s the most amazing assistant ever, but I do think these things will catch on. It requires a bit of tinkering to make it absolutely a must have. I like it, I’m keeping it for sure, and the little quirks can be fixed on Google’s side. And the google ecosystem products work well with it. This is a good buy. I can’t say for sure that smart home devices are the future. But I can say they are super helpful right now and does save you a little bit of time in some daily tasks. And the barrier to entry, on both the Google Home mini, and Amazon Alexa is really low and open to almost everyone. Anyway guys, I hope you guys found this video useful, if you enjoyed it, give it a thumbs up, comment, and well, don’t forget to subscribe. I’ll see you guys next time.