Google Home Mini smart speaker with a JBL Flip 2 Bluetooth speaker.
The Google Mini, pictured above, you can make into a Bluetooth speaker due to firmware and Google Home app updates in the last several years. In this piece, we show how to link your Google Mini to a tablet or phone to play audio on it just as you would do on a common BT speaker. You indeed can send audio to the Mini, for room-filling, shockingly awesome sounding audio, given how small the Google Mini is.
Here, we connect the Google Mini smart speaker to an iPad Air tablet as a Bluetooth speaker. This allows us to play any audio that the iPad can play, through the Mini. You might wish this if you’re watching a Netflix movie or playing your Alexa music library on your iPhone, but want louder, and over all better sound than what you get from the phone speakers.
Firstly, make sure that both your tablet and your Google Mini are online and connected to the internet.
In addition, enable Bluetooth on the source device that you’re pairing with the Google Mini. In our case, we’re pairing from an iPad Air.
Then, and assure that you see the “Now discoverable as” message, as shown next.
Thirdly, on the test iPad, this app appears on the third home page, as pictured next.
The Google Home app home screen then displays, as pictured next.
Fourthly, find the hamburger menu control near the top left corner of the Google Home app home screen.
Tapping that control 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.
Find the control menu (hamburger) item pointed at by the purple arrow in the last picture.
Tapping this control causes the speaker device control menu to open, as shown in the next picture.
Find the Settings item in the hamburger menu as displayed in the previous picture, with the purple circle around it.
You then see the Device Settings screen for the specific Google Mini speaker device displayed on the previous screen. This speaker’s specific setting options are shown on the screen shown next. In our case, that device 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.
Find the Paired Bluetooth Devices option circled in the previous picture.
Then, the Paired Bluetooth Devices screen then appears as shown next, where we could select a Bluetooth device from a list of devices that we’ve previously paired with, had we ever paired with any before. But 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.
Find Bluetooth Settings somewhere in the Settings app on your phone or tablet.
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, we wish to pair the Office Speaker Google Mini device, as circled above.
Then, if all goes well, your Google 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 pairing with 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 has added the source device (your phone or tablet) to its Known Bluetooth Devices list for your Google Mini speaker, as we show in the next picture. Our pairing source device is called Tom’s iPad.
At this point, all your tablet’s generated sounds would play on your Google Mini smart speaker, which is now acting as a full fledged Bluetooth speaker. Pairing is complete.
Finally, to stop using your Google Mini as a Bluetooth speaker, you would unpair it from a source Bluetooth device by saying, “Okay Google, disconnect” or “Hey Google, disconnect.” Google Mini allows you to unpair your speaker from the source by either issuing these voice commands to it, or by going into the Bluetooth settings on your source device, and breaking the connection from there.
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