Google Home to Get New Features via Major Update as Google I/O 2017 Approaches

Google Home multi-user support coming

Google Home is getting some major updates via app update 2.3 that is expected to be announced at Google’s I/O 2017 conference that kicks off tomorrow, May 17, 2017 and runs through May 19 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. The features hiding in the upcoming version update were discovered by developers at XDA in the APK file for v2.3.

Google Assistant will be getting third-party device support with this version, now that Google has launched the Google Assistant SDK. Developers should soon be able to start integrating Google Assistant into their own products. NVIDIA’s Spot speakers could be the first of these.

Another major feature is what Google is calling “cloud casting”. Casting, as you know, has only been possible with Chromecast hardware, and the devices need to be on the same network or placed next to each other. Cloud casting appears to break free from the network or proximity barrier, allowing you to cast media such as videos, music and photos from outside the network or from a remote location. It’s not available on any live build yet, so it’s not a given that it will appear as an actual feature on the new update.

There’s also a string that looks like it adds new reminder controls, similar to the way it works with Home Control, Shopping and other functions that can be found in the app’s menu.

The keynote address will kick off at 10 am, and we hope to glean some nuggets of information from the live broadcast for our readers. One of the other segments we’ll be watching closely is the one on Android Auto at 2 pm; simultaneously, there will be a one-hour session on Google Home and Google Cast where we hope to learn more about cloud casting and other new features for Google Home with the new major update.

Other areas of interest for us will be the sessions on Instant Apps, Android O, Google IoT, Material Components (MDC) for Android, Web and iOS, Android Pay, Daydream and Tango, machine learning with Google Brain, and Android TV. And that’s just Day 1.

We’ll keep you up to date on happenings, revelations, forward technologies and everything else coming out of I/O 2017 (#io17), so stay tuned for three days of intimacy with the best of Google.

Thanks for visiting! Would you do us a favor? If you think it’s worth a few seconds, please like our Facebook page and follow us on TwitterIt would mean a lot to us. Thank you.

Sources: Android Headlines, Google