How to find everything Google Home can do
Google Home can do much more than it's given credit for. Here's a website that will show you all it's capable of.
One of the biggest boons for Amazon's Alexa speakers were third-party skills. Now with over 30,000 skills available, there isn't much Alexa can't do. Similarly, Google Home has its own catalog of third-party software. These third-party services are referred to as Assistant apps and, since the beginning, finding them has been difficult, if not impossible.
Originally, going to More settings > Assistant apps in the Google Home app would take you to a single, alphabetical list of all the available apps. Not only was it not categorized or sortable, there was no way to search. So to browse and find services that worked with your Google Home speaker, you simply had to scroll through a rapidly growing list of random add-ons.
Thankfully, that all changed. Google recently overhauled the Google Home and Google Assistant apps, bringing these services to the forefront of the experience.
You won't find a section dedicated to the Assistant apps in the Google Home app anymore. Instead, when you open Google Home and tap the hamburger button in the top left, you'll see an option called Explore. Tapping that will shoot you over into the Google Assistant app where you can browse all the available apps. Here you also get suggestions for what you can ask Google Home, see what apps are new or trending and can view apps by category (scroll all the way down and tap All Categories).
Tapping on any of the cards will show you what an Assistant app can do, how to invoke it and which devices it's available on.
You can now find third-party services for Google Home on the web.
The best part? This Explore page in the Google Assistant app can also be viewed from the web. Point your browser to assistant.google.com/explore.
The most daunting part, however, is knowing where to begin -- like knowing what to search. The first time we visited this site, we weren't exactly sure how to search or what to search for. The best way to approach it is to keep it simple and let Google do what Google does best. You can search things like "weather" to find apps that might give you a more accurate weather forecast than the default weather service. Or if you want to know what smart lights work with Google Home, just search "smart lights." The answers will come in sometimes surprisingly specific categories. Click the one you were looking for to see a list of all the related apps.
This is not only a huge win for Google Home users, it's a huge win for Google Home itself. After months of feeling like Google Home was much more capable than I gave it credit for, there's finally a place to go where you can actually search all it can do. You can find everything you're looking for or everything Google Home speakers are capable of easily and fast.
