For all of the talk of how voice assistants could be the future of IoT or computing in general, the only consistently engaging use of home assistants like Echo or Google Home seems to be audio playback.
Today, Google is making it a bit easier for the cheapos to get in on the action, as it’s beginning to roll out support for Spotify free accounts on its Home platform. Google announced the integration was coming back at its Google I/O conference.
Currently the company’s home assistant supports Google Play Music Free and Premium, Spotify Free and Premium, Pandora, YouTube Music, TuneIn and iHeartRadio. Deezer and Soundcloud support should be on the way soon as support for them was also announced at I/O.
Life in the free lane isn’t as glamorous on Home with Spotify as there are a few differences in the way you can use the service. First off, you won’t be able to get the Home to play specific songs, albums or artists, instead you’ll have to settle for selecting music by mood, genre or one of the Spotify-curated playlists.
Things get dialed in a little bit more when you’re requesting Google Assistant to play Spotify on a Chromecast audio-enabled device in which case you’ll be able to request specific playlists or artists and hear the applicable jams on shuffle. If you’re casting to a TV, your experience should be pretty comparable to what you get on Premium with abilities to request songs, playlists, artists and albums all supported.
Check out the full spread on what you can and can’t do with Spotify Free on Google Home here.
Also, obligatory:
This article was originally published by Tech Crunch.
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