Google just filled a gaping home automation gap

You’d think pressing a button to kick off a smart routine would be a no-brainer, right? Alexa lets you do it, Apple’s HomeKit platform lets you do it. But Google Home? Nope—or at least, not until now. 

In the release notes for the latest Google Home update, Google says it now allows for smart buttons to act as “starters,” meaning they can—at last—be used to trigger smart routines. 

For example, you can now create a Google Home routine that lets you double-tap a button to, say, set your dining room lights to a particular lighting scene, or long-press a button to turn your lights off. 

Other smart buttons options for triggering a Google Home routine including single- and multi-presses and a long-press release, meaning you could enable separate smart routines that fire when you long-press the button and then when you finally release the button. 

For now, the ability to add a button as a trigger for a Google Home routine is restricted to the standard Google automations editor, not via the Gemini-powered Ask Home chatbox or the “Help me create” wizard. Once button triggers do some to Ask Home and/or “Help me create,” you’ll be able to ask Gemini to bake smart buttons into your automations. 

The addition of button-press automation triggers in Google Home routines has been a long time in coming. Alexa has long allowed users to use buttons as starters, and the same goes for Apple’s HomeKit platform. 

Smart buttons make for great ways to control your smart lights; I have Philips Hue buttons in my dining room and stairway that I use to control entire rooms of Hue smart lights. But now that you can use smart buttons in Google Home routines, you can get even more creative about what happens upon a button press.

Thanks to Matter, the smart home-unifying standard that’s finally gaining its footing, there’s a growing number of smart buttons that will work with all the major smart platforms, including Google Home. 

Arre, for example, makes a popular (if pricey) smart button with Matter support, while Ikea sells its Matter-enabled Bilresa button for just $6. The Bilresa button comes with dual buttons and an adhesive backing, making it easy—and cheap—to add multiple buttons throughout the house. 

Support for smart button triggers wasn’t the only addition for Google Home in the latest update. You can now set automations to fire when (or only if) the humidity in a room reaches or exceeds a certain threshold, or when your robot vacuum is docked.

Other new Google Home routine starters and conditions include when a battery in a connected device is low or charging, when a contact sensor detects a door or window is closed or opened, or when a leak sensor reports binary “freeze” or “leak” states. 

This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart switches and dimmers.