Google’s been slowly but surely adding more and more device types to its list of supported Actions for Google Assistant, and today they’ve opened the flood gates, well the plumbing type anyway. The latest devices types are Baths and Faucets (or you might just call them taps).
Both device types have the kind of interactions you’d expect with Baths supporting “Fill” and “On/Off” commands. Using Fill a user can pre-program how much water is needed for a bath and the tap will dispense the exact amount of water needed.
Faucets have slightly extended functionality including “Dispense” “Modes”, “On/Off” and “Start/Stop”. On/Off and Start/Stop are self-explanatory, ‘Modes’ is a method to allow users to set the state of the tap, e.g. set to hot, cold, warm, 36.7 degrees. Dispense is altogether cool, want a cup of water, ask for it, need to fill that pasta pot, developers can let you set customised fill amounts, you get the idea.
There are already a few Alexa smart taps available on the market, although not in Australia that we’re aware of, so hopefully, those companies will expand their products to include Google Assistant support, and then roll them out internationally.
While Google may be playing catch up to Amazon and their range of devices types, they are making ground, consistently.
