Software
Google Smart Display Assistant is having dark mode and multiple account support
Google greatly upgrades the look and features of the app on its Assistant Smart Displays. Starting this week, smart displays such as the Nest Hub and third-party businesses will be upgraded with a new home screen experience: dark mode, and eventually, the option to monitor calendar activities from more than one Google Account.
The biggest adjustment is the updated home screen, which is built to provide you with contextual details based on your preferences and the time of day. Instead of a never-ending horizontal array, Google now splits the information into five different sections — Day Time, Home Power, Media, Connect, and Discover — accessible from tabs at the top of the page.
The time of the day tab will change its title based on what you look at it (i.e. Your Morning, Your Midday, Your Evening, etc.) and will display a number of information cards that Google finds important to you at the time.
This will include plug-in tiles for playing songs, news stories, monitoring individual smart home gadgets, and so on. Google states the tiles seen on each screen have dynamic sizes based on their height. The media page would include bigger tiles that provide details on what is being played and controls below, for example.
Another cool trick on the media tab is the opportunity to see what's being played on other Assistant Speakers and screens in the home and monitor them, as well. Google says it's going to have deep-linked tabs in this segment, so instead of just opening Disney Plus, you can jump straight back to the show you've been watching the last time you've used Disney Plus.
The Home Control tab is where all smart home controls live, while the Discover tab is essentially a location for Google to sell new functionality or content to you based on your search history and user habits.
What doesn't alter here is the main screen that exists when you're not communicating with the smart monitor. This remains a slideshow of images or a static clock, depending on your tastes. I 'd love to see the possibility of a smart home dashboard showing temperature, calendar, smart home commands, and video feeds in one location at a glance.
In addition to the new gui, Google also adds a dark mode that turns on automatically based on the time of day, the room's ambient light, or that can be manually chosen. A new sunrise alarm will steadily raise the brightness of your phone and the frequency of your alarm to make it easier to wake up in the morning.
Finally, Google has introduced one of the most requested features since the Assistant Smart Displays first emerged: the option to access information from both a personal and a functioning Google account at the same time. For now, this is limited to calendar appointments, and Google says you can connect up to five separate Google Meet accounts to a single monitor and turn between them at will. In addition, Google Meet is getting the auto-framing capabilities that have been available with Duo on the Nest Hub Max since it was released, as well as the ability to swap between various grid views on a call.
Taken as a whole, these updates demonstrate that Google is spending more in smart-display touch-based experience. Although the company assures me that it still views these items as voice-firsts, and still sees a lot of voice experiences on them, it adds these changes to enhance the experience when you're not five or six feet away from the computer.
It's almost as if the smart display is going to become a true computing device, as opposed to an ambient screen that is called upon to play music or display any information as prompted by a voice command.
It's also an extension to what Google is doing with the newly released Google TV app on the new Google Chromecast, by bringing all of your usage through its different platforms and giving you entertainment suggestions based on that. Google says the latest app is beginning to roll out to Assistant Smart Displays this week, but it could take some time to hit all of them.
