Google Home is now available in Australia, but of course the hard core amongst us has already got one of these great speakers available in their home. We’ve previously been listening to some yankee voice telling us what’s what, but that’s in the past now because Google Home now speaks strayan.
You’ll need to update your Google Home preferences to do this, but it’s absolutely easy to do. All you have to do is open the Google Home app, head to the slide out Nav Drawer and select ‘More Settings’. From this selection tap on your Google Home – if you have multiple, you only have to update one – and then tap on Assistant Language, from there choose English (Australia) from the list and you’ll be good to go.
This propogated to all my Google Home units quite quickly. The voice now changes to the familiar Australian Google Assistant voice and it delightfully understands ‘Strayan’ questions like ‘How far to the nearest servo’.
Of course, you can now update your ‘My Day’ section with better podcast options. Google has added in Sky News, ABC Australia as well as a heap of Australian news sources like sports from AFL, NRL and motor sport news and more. To update your sources, go to the ‘More Settings’ option again, then select ‘My Day’ and click on the cog next to ‘News’ from there you can select ‘+ add news sources’ and scroll through the list of options available. There’s a massive amount of sources here and you can then re-order them.
Ok, you’ve done all this, now ask Google Home ‘Ok Google, tell me about my day’. Once it’s finished going through traffic, your calendar etc. you’ll get the news from these sources.
As a bonus, with an Aussie Google Assistant, you can even ask it some interesting Australian based easter egg questions like:
- ‘Are we going to Bonnie Doon’
- ‘Are Drop Bears Real’
and if you’re lucky, if you say ‘Hey Google, Goodnight’ tonight you may get a ‘Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the mozzies bite’.
Have you found any Australian Google Easter Eggs? Let us know in the comments
if you ask Google home to play a game, and choose lucky trivia.. It gives you Aussie nicknames such as wallaby ( not sure if that was there before)
Seems if you use Aussie region, you lose half of the functionality, shortcuts, all Assistant apps, things like AutoVoice support, OurGroceries support etc etc. I was starting to be swayed to consider buying one to have a play, but not until that’s changed.
And I haven’t (so far at least) been able to restore mine. Switching the region back to English(US) hasn’t seemed to have done the trick. Hope they add those features soon, especially shortcuts. Weird that Assistant Apps are US only, I mean the whole category – I can understand if the Assistant Apps list shrunk but none at all is just plain weird.
So if you buy an import for almost half the price of local stock, you can just change this setting and effectively the import Google Home is the same as the Australian delivered minus the power adapter?
Yep. I have three from the US.
I updated to aussie google voice last night. What I did notice though is I lost Harmony control which I wasn’t using a lot of anyway. This may now force me to do a better job with home assistant.
I was using harmony a bit, will have to go back to IFTT now.