New update lets you move video and music between speakers
With a few Google Home speakers in your house you can have a decent multi-room system going, but Google is finally making it easier to transfer music from one speaker to another.
The latest update to Google Assistant, rolling out as you read this, brings a new feature called Stream Transfer, which lets you move a stream of a song, YouTube video or podcast from one speaker to another.
To begin with, this will work with all Google Home, Nest and Chromecast devices. So you could move a music stream from a Google Home Mini to a Nest Hub Max, or send a video from the Max to a TV with a Chromecast dongle.
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If you’re using a smart display like the Max, you can also use the touchscreen to send that stream over to another Nest display or TV. It also works with transferring from one speaker to a speaker group, so long as that group has been set up in the app.
Using it is pretty simple too: just say something like, “Hey Google, move the music to the kitchen speaker”.
Stream Transfer won’t work with third-party speakers or television to start. So you can’t transfer to Google Assistant speakers from the likes of Sonos, or third-party Google Smart Displays (i.e. anything not Nest branded).
It also only works with Chromecast dongles, not Chromecast-enabled TVs. Not yet. Google says this should come to third-party devices in time.
You’re also limited on which services can be transferred. Spotify, Pandora and YouTube Music are all good to go on the music side, but for video you’re limited to only transferring YouTube videos right now – no YouTube TV. But again, we expect this will evolve in time.
