Tech News: Google Home Presence Sensing Is Now More Reliable

If you have Google smart devices, you probably use Home & Away Routines, scenarios that are automatically triggered depending on whether you’re at home or not. For example, when everyone is away, the lights turn off and the temperature drops.

Such automations can be very handy. They are often based on presence detection. And as a rule, when talking about such a feature, various motion sensors, detectors and GPS location are the first to come to mind. All true, but they do not always show the real situation. When you leave your home, other people may still stay indoors. And these may lead to annoying problems.

To improve home presence detection and automation performance in general, Google Home recently announced new supported presence sensing devices. These are Nest Hubs and Nest speakers.

But before we go deeper into how exactly these devices help detect presence, and how to set them up for this, let's first figure out how Google Home Presence Sensing works.

How Does Google Home Presence Sensing Work?

Google’s presence sensing feature helps to determine if someone is home. Here's how it works: Google Home collects signals from various supported devices connected to your smart home ecosystem and uses them to infer the presence of someone inside.

The presence-related data can be collected from motion and presence sensors (occupancy sensors) or the Soli sensor built into some Nest devices, smart doorlocks, as well as from your phone’s location.

Devices can also transmit data to the system based on your interaction with them. For example, if you have just changed the temperature on the thermostat, the smart home system will recognize that you are inside. The same works for Nest speakers and displays - the presence will be detected when interacting with the device using touch or voice control.

What Nest Devices Can Detect Presence?

Considering that Nest Hubs and speakers are also in, the full list of supported devices now looks like this:

• Nest Learning Thermostat,
• Nest Protect,
• Nest Guard,
• Nest × Yale Lock,
• Nest Hub,
• Nest speakers.

How to Set Up Google Home Presence Sensing?

First, if you want to use Google Home Presence Sensing, open the Google Home app and tap the circular “Settings” shortcut. You will find “Presence sensing” under “Features”. Here you can choose which devices are allowed to detect presence and even set their functionality (Assistant commands, touch control, motion sensor, etc.).

This works on Google Home for Android and iOS. You can change the settings at any time.

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