Google Home app now lets you assign speakers to specific rooms

Google Home speakers can help owners control a number of smart home devices with voice commands. However, if you own more than one Google Home device, you couldn’t assign it to a specific room in the speaker’s app. That has now changed, thanks to the latest update for the Google Home app that was rolled out earlier this week.

In addition to a new user interface and Night Mode, the Google Home app will now show a message in the Home Control menu that will ask you to assign the speaker to a specific room (again, assuming you own more than one of them). This small, long-awaited addition means that if you have assigned a Google Home speaker to, say, your office, you can now say “OK Google, turn off the office” and it will not only shut down any smart devices assigned to it in that room, but the speaker itself as well.

This new functionality came just before Google’s big press event today, where the company debuted a smaller and cheaper speaker, the Google Home Mini. It’s likely that Google added the room assignment addition to the app because it anticipates that more people will buy more than one of these Google Home Mini devices to set up in their house.