We all are quite aware of Google Now’s ability as a voice assistant. The voice assistant service from Google has been growing ever since it was launched. With additions like Google Now on Tap and Conversational features, the famous voice assistant have been directly competing with Apple’s Siri and in most of the cases even winning over it. Recently, Google also integrated with various food ordering apps like Zomato to let users order food or book a table from the App itself.
One thing which has been there for a while now and we are pretty sure you didn’t know about it is the ability to control activities on YouTube via Google Now. Yes, you can actually Pause, Play, Skip ads over YouTube just by your voice commands.
In order to do so, you have to first enable the ‘Ok Google’ hotword detection from any screen. For that, you need to open up the ‘Google’ app, go to the Settings > Voice > “Ok Google” detection > Enable from any screen option. If it’s your first time, the app will ask you to speak ‘Ok Google’ to train itself and recognise your speech every time you intent to use various commands.
Next open up the YouTube app, or just give a command ‘Open YouTube’ in the Google Search app. Now search any video you want to watch and Play. Unfortunately, you cannot rely on Google Now to search a video on YouTube and Play it for you. However, once you have tapped the Play button, you can use bunch of commands. Following are most of the commands you can use while playing videos on YouTube
“Pause” – Pauses the video.
“Play” – Resumes the video.
“Stop” – Stops the video and quits buffering, works exactly like switching to another app and switching back.
“Minimize” – Moves the video to the tiny window at the bottom right.
“Maximize” – Makes the video full screen.
“Exit”, “Close player” – Closes the video, but leaves YouTube open.
“Play on…”, “Connect to…” – Starts playing the video on another device, choices are “TV”, “Chromecast”, or “Console.” Unfortunately, you can’t seem to be able to say the name of the device (such as a Chromecast’s name).
“Disconnect from…” – The opposite of the last command, stops playing the video on a remote device.
“Skip ads” – Skips those annoying ads appearing before a video.
Well, one might argue that these Voice commands are a lot slower and takes a lot of time but these commands can be extremely useful if you want to control the YouTube app and you can’t use your hands. A famous example can be watching a video while cooking or doing other stuff which keeps your hands engaged and you won’t want to use your phone with those messy and wet hands.
We did test this feature thoroughly and most of the times it responded pretty well. Though some of the times the word ‘Pause’ was somehow mistaken as False or even Paul. Other than that, the ‘Skip Ads’ command was extremely helpful. Let us know in the comments section below if you knew about this feature and if Yes, have you ever used it?