Google just filled a gaping home automation gap

You’d think that pressing a button to start 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? No, or at least not until now.

In the release notes for the latest Google Home update, Google says it now allows smart buttons to act as “starters,” meaning they can finally 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 off your lights.

Other smart button options for triggering a Google Home routine include single and multiple presses and long press, which means you can enable separate smart routines that trigger 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 limited to the standard Google Automation Editor, not through the Gemini-powered Ask Home chat box or the “Help me create” wizard. Once the buttons trigger to ask Home and/or “Help me create”, you will be able to ask Gemini to integrate smart buttons into your automations.

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

Smart buttons are great ways to control your smart lights; I have Philips Hue buttons in my dining room and on my stairs 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 be even more creative about what happens when you press a button.

Thanks to Matter, the unifying smart home standard finally taking hold, there are a growing number of smart buttons that will work with all major smart platforms, including Google Home.

Arre, for example, makes a popular (although expensive) smart button with Matter support, while Ikea sells its Matter-compatible Bilresa button for just $6. The Bilresa button comes with two buttons and an adhesive backing, making it easy and inexpensive to add multiple buttons throughout your home.

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

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

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