Original Google Home smart speaker, front left view, sitting on desk.
All current Google Home smart speakers may now be used as Bluetooth speakers, thanks to firmware and Google Home app updates in 2017. Here, we show how to connect your tablet or phone to a Google Home smart speaker via Bluetooth. That way, you can then transmit audio to the speaker for room-filling, awesome sounding playback given how small these smart speakers are. Furthermore in this post, we offer Google Home Bluetooth speaker pairing instructions. Plus, while this demo shows the process using the Google Home Mini, a like process also works with the original Google Home smart speaker, as well as the Google Home Max.
Now we wish to connect (pair) a Google Home smart speaker to an iPad Air tablet, such that the speaker becomes a Bluetooth speaker. Again, this allows play of any audio that the iPad is playing, through that speaker. Why would you wish t do this? Because perhaps you’re watching a Netflix movie or playing your Amazon music library on your iPhone, but wish to have louder, and over all better sound for it. So pairing your device to the Google Home Mini indeed fills this bill.
Firstly, make sure that both your tablet and your Google Home based speaker are online and connected to the Internet.
Secondly, do this on the source device that you’re pairing with the Google Mini (in our case, we’re pairing from an iPad Air), and assure that you see the “Now discoverable as” message, as shown next.
Thirdly, on our iPad, this app appears on the third home page, as pictured next.
The Google Home app home screen then displays, as pictured next.
Find this at the top left corner of the Google Home app home screen. This brings up the main menu window, as shown next.
This brings up the list of Google Home devices that the app knows about, as shown next. We’ve scrolled down the list of in-network devices and located our Mini, as shown.
The purple arrow points this out in the previous picture. The hamburger menu opens, as shown in the next picture.
In addition, see this displayed in the previous picture, with the purple circle around it. You then see the Device Settings screen for the specific Google Home speaker device, similar to as displayed on the previous screen, whose specific setting options appear on the screen shown next. In our case, that device, the Google Home Mini, is named Office Speaker.
Note that we’ve scrolled down to the Device Settings section on this screen to find the Paired Bluetooth Devices option, as circled in the next picture.
This is circled in the previous picture.
The Paired Bluetooth Devices screen then appears as shown next, where we can select a Bluetooth device from a list of devices that we’ve previously paired with, had we ever paired with any before. Since we have not, the screen is almost entirely blank.
This puts the Google Home device we’re working with into Bluetooth discovery mode. That is, it will now show up when other in-range devices scan for Bluetooth Devices. Confirmation of this is shown by a black bar momentarily appearing at the bottom of the Paired Bluetooth Devices screen, as shown next.
On our iPad Air, we hit the home button, tapped the Settings app, and then tapped Bluetooth on the left side of the screen, to reveal the following screen.
In our case here, that would be the Office Speaker device, as circled above.
Then, if all goes well, your Mini plays a short burst of musical chord, and pairing then occurs. Your paired device then moves up from the Other Devices list to My Devices if you’re using the pairing feature on an iOS device, as shown next for our case; the purple circled Office Speaker device.
There, you’ll now find that the Google Home App had added the source device (your phone or tablet) to its known Bluetooth devices list, as illustrated in the next picture. Our pairing source device is called Tom’s iPad.
Finally, at this point, all your tablet’s generated sounds would play on your Google Home smart speaker. Pairing is complete.
Lastly, you would unpair your Google Home from a source Bluetooth device as follows. Say “Okay Google, disconnect”. Or, say “Hey Google, disconnect”. Moreover, if you do not fancy giving voice commands, go into the Bluetooth settings on your source device. Then you can break the Bluetooth connection from there.
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