Google Home gets multi-user support in the UK (Update: Canada too?)

Update, June 29: Users in Canada – including our own Brian Reigh – reported getting the multi-user feature on their Google Home units. There’s no official announcement yet, but it doesn’t hurt to check if you have it.

Original post, June 27: Google Home now supports multiple users in the UK. It allows up to six people to connect their accounts, giving them access to their own personal playlists, commute time, schedule and more.

To add multiple users to the device, you first have to have the latest version of the Google Home app installed on your device. Then just open it, find and select the “multi-user is available” card, and tap on “Link your account”.

Once that’s done, you’ll go through a process that will allow the Assistant to understand your voice by saying “Ok Google” and “Hey Google” two times each. These two phrases are then analyzed by a neural network that’s capable of detecting certain characteristics of a person’s voice. What this means is that from then on, every time you talk to Assistant on Google Home it will know that it’s you and not one of the other people who are also using the same device.

Support for multiple users is available for UK users starting from today. The feature has been available to those in the US for almost three months now, as Google has released it back in April.

The online search giant has to figure out a way to make the Google Home more appealing to users, based on the fact that it hasn’t been selling quite as well as Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers. According to the research firm eMarketer, Echo and Echo Dot devices are expected to claim a 70.6 percent share of the US market in 2017, while Google Home will only grab 23.8 percent of the market.