BeoSound Moment & voice control with Google Home

30 replies
Google made a nice little update to Google Home, so it can connect to Bluetooth speakers by default. I was quite surprised at how well it works together with the Bluetooth connection on the Moment. I made a quick video and uploaded here so others can see the basic setup and try.

Also note what happens on the display of the Moment. That even surprised me, so a bit of an Easter Egg 😕

https://youtu.be/X7STTbC7n7E

PS. Disclaimer. This is not an official B&O video and doesn’t indicate any promises about future work by the team or company.

How is the sound quality streamed from the Google Home? Steaming Spotify via Amazon Echo to a B&O speaker is just horrible.

You will for sure not want to use this method for starting music that you want to spend quality time listening to.

I’ll leave it connected like this as an experiment and see if there are any times where it genuinely feels useful or becomes the go-to interface for anyone in our family.

Hi Lyle - great....

Any idea if the same ‘trick’ could be used with the Essence MK2/Core?

If it works, it will be fun to see, if the app reacts just like the Moment ;-)

MM

Location: Flensborg————Danmark

Great! thanks for sharing the video. Seems to work quite well. 

I understand Deezer support for Google Home is available only in France and the UK at the moment. 

Once it supports Deezer  for the Netherlands I will certainly hook one up myself. 

Best, 

Peter

It's great to see the potential of what can be achieved with voice control. I wonder how far off (and how feasible it is) when we'll see tighter integration with Alexa and Google Home so that we don't have to relay on poor audio quality streaming or IFTTT using a BLGW. After all, B&O is all about sound quality and we can't compromise that.

beojeff wrote:

It's great to see the potential of what can be achieved with voice control. I wonder how far off (and how feasible it is) when we'll see tighter integration with Alexa and Google Home so that we don't have to relay on poor audio quality streaming or IFTTT using a BLGW. After all, B&O is all about sound quality and we can't compromise that.

 

Agreed.  Although playing a Google Home to a speaker over Bluetooth is a nifty trick, the same could be done by hooking a Chomecast dongle into the Line-In of a Moment.  Or by hooking an inexpensive Bluetooth receiver into an amplifier to drive the speakers without the Moment.

Ideally, I should be able to stand in the living room and say "Hey Google, play BBC Radio 1" and it will automatically start TuneIn radio on the Moment (or Core, or Essence) in the living room.  Meaning it initiates the stream on the device itself, not playing it over Bluetooth.  Then I could wander into the kitchen and say "Hey Google, join the living room stream" and the Essence (or Core) in the kitchen would join the active stream from the living room.

I know that the Google Actions is a relatively new system, and companies much larger than B&O are working hard to integrate into this new ecosystem.  I can only hope that Bang and Olufsen recognizes the importance of full native integration (rather than the simple Bluetooth connection now offered) and has a development team working on this.

My B&O Icons:

Beosound-Stage.png Beosound-Stage.png
Beosound-Moment.png Beosound-Moment.png
Beosound-Level.png Beosound-Level.png
Beosound-Essence.png Beosound-Essence.png
Beosound-Balance.png Beosound-Balance.png
Beosound-A5.png Beosound-A5.png
Beosound-2.png Beosound-2.png
Beoremote-Halo.png Beoremote-Halo.png
Beoplay-M5.png Beoplay-M5.png
Beoplay-Earset.png Beoplay-Earset.png
Beoplay-A6.png Beoplay-A6.png

This is really well said laseralex. I find the Homepod attractive exactly for this reason, being able to just say for example “play some uplifting music” and voila! But I sense B&O has to be working on such native voice control support so I’ll rather wait and see (would prefer to have B&O audio at home). This “imperfect” bluetooth setup looks more like a proof of concept for the B&O team, but it does imply to me at least that something more substantial has to be in development - maybe a new voice controlled audio system... 

Like was publicly presented as a proof of concept at CES 2018.

https://vimeo.com/250350270

Well, there we go! ;) And as Google Actions become more comprehensively available for/with Deezer, I believe we will see more of Deezer integration on top of this Spotify example. This is cool, thanks for sharing.

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