This week saw Google brings its Assistant to Australian households with Google Home, but you can keep making the home smarter with compatible plugs.
Fresh from a a promise earlier on, D-Link has announced that its Smart Plug will talk to Google Home, making it possible for you to turn on and off devices around the home that happened to be plugged into its WiFi-friendly plug port.
That means if you have a gadget you’d like to control in an intelligent way using the web and wireless networks, you can do so, plugging a device into D-Link’s DSP-W215, a plug port extension that throws in a burst of WiFi and the technology needed to talk to Google’s Home and the Google Assistant.
Once linked to your home network and Google, if you have a Google Home appliance, you’ll be able to talk to it and ask it to turn the appliance on and off.
Unfortunately, you can’t talk to the wall plug itself, as D-Link’s Smart Plug lacks a microphone and speaker, so if you don’t have a Google Home unit – or you do and it’s out of earshot – keep your smartphone or tablet with you, because that’s where you’ll be talking, directly to the Google Assistant app.
For homes beginning to make the transition to a “smart” world, it’s the beginning, though not all appliances may play nicely. If you have devices that have their own on and off switch outside of the plug port, you may find that controlling their power directly through the plug may not do much, though that will happen through testing.
And keep in mind, this is all a little ahead of its time, but later on as more devices arrive sporting connectivity to smart home systems like Google Home and Apple’s HomeKit, things will get easier.
Right now, however, D-Link’s DSP-W215 gives you a bit of a start, and if you have started integrating Google in your life, it’s a start you can easily dabble with, especially with your each plug costing about $50 each.
