Google Home Now Works With Bluetooth Speakers; Clips Camera Can Capture High-Resolution Images

Highlights

• Google Home is getting Bluetooth support
• Users can pair the speaker with Google Home app
• Clips companion app reveals new features

Google on Wednesday rolled out an update to the Google Home app that enables users to connect the Assistant-enabled speaker to any Bluetooth speaker. This essentially means that the Google Home, Home Mini, and Home Max will be able to play music via your Bluetooth speaker. Before this, only Google Cast-enabled speakers could be used to connect to an external speaker or group speakers with the Google Home devices. The new feature is especially useful for a device like Google Home Mini that thanks to its size has limitations while playing music. In another update, Google Clips camera now gets the ability to take high-resolution stills when manually capturing a clip.
Bluetooth speaker support was a long-awaited feature in the Google Home Mini. The company in a blog post says, "We brought this feature to life after hearing how much you wanted to amp up the sound with your Google Home Mini." It added, "Now any of your Google Home devices can connect to other Bluetooth speakers so you can control your entertainment experience simply using the sound of your voice." Interestingly, users can now also add existing Bluetooth speakers to a group in the Google Home app for multi-room audio, which could be useful for Home Max users.
In order to access the new feature, users will have to pair a Bluetooth speaker to the Google Home in the Google Home app. Once paired, music, or any other audio will automatically start playing via the connected speaker instead of the speaker. With the multi-room audio feature, you can connect several speakers around the house so that Google Assistant will play the audio in all the rooms simultaneously.
Google has also noted that users will still have to talk to their Google Home device and not the connected Bluetooth speakers, for queries like asking questions, getting weather updates, and using smart home commands.
Meanwhile, Google has rolled out an update to its Clips camera. Last year in October, Google had unveiled the automatic camera called Google Clips, which is designed to capture candid moments of familiar people and pets by using on-device machine intelligence. As spotted by 9to5Google, the update lets Google Clips camera to capture higher resolution images.
By pushing the shutter button on the Google Clips camera, either manually or in the app's Live Preview option, the captured photo gets saved in high resolution. Also, the update added another feature where users will be able to pinch to zoom in the app, to get a closer look at the pictures.