I’ve been using Google Nest speakers since they were still called Google Home, back when the company was handing them out like candy. Over the years, I’ve mostly stuck to the basics of using the smart speakers to set timers, control lights, and get quick answers to random questions, but even carrying out those simple tasks is not without frustration. Part of the challenge of these devices is how particular they are about how you speak to them, but I’ve learned a few tricks that make it easier.

Smart speakers in general are in a bit of an awkward phase right now. Most are still stuck with software that can only understand a handful of very specific phrases, and can get stuck if you don’t phrase a question or request just so. Meanwhile, LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are somehow able to understand complex instructions, even if they sometimes struggle to follow those instructions.

It may be a while before smart speakers are dragged into our LLM-enabled future, but there are a few things you can do to make them work better in the meantime. In this article I’m focusing on Google Home and its Nest speakers because that’s the ecosystem I personally use, but many of these tips will apply to other smart speaker systems as well. For example, while Google has Voice Match, Amazon’s Echo has Voice ID; both of these tools identify who’s speaking to them. Even if you’re in a different smart speaker ecosystem, it’s worth poking around to see what your options are.

Try out the Gemini preview (if you can)

Arguably, the most function for an LLM like Gemini is interpreting voice commands, but for now Gemini is still locked behind a Public Preview. Though “public” might be a bit of a misnomer. While you can opt-in to trying out Gemini on your smart speakers, there are several conditions. You must:

• Be a Nest Aware subscriber. Ostensibly, the Nest Aware subscription is mainly for video features on your Nest cameras, but Google has a tendency to lump other smart home features into it. The Gemini preview is one of those. A subscription costs $8/month or $80/year, but we probably wouldn’t recommend getting it just to try out Gemini early.

• Enroll in the Google Home app public preview. There’s a separate public preview for new Google Home features that you’ll have to opt-in to before you can even get to the Gemini preview. You can find full instructions here based on your devices.

• Opt-in to experimental AI features. Once you’re in the Google Home public preview, you’ll get a message in the Google Home app inviting you to enable experimental AI features. Make sure this is toggled on as well, or you’ll miss the Gemini option.

• Then…wait. Even after all of this, Google doesn’t guarantee you’ll immediately gain access to the Gemini preview, which is annoying. But if you want a shot at trying it out, you’ll need to jump through the above hoops.

For now, this isn’t going to be practical for most people, but if you’re already a Nest Aware subscriber, it might be worth giving it a try. Google Nest devices currently default to the Google Assistant, which does little more than scan your requests for simple keywords. If you want to talk to your speaker in real, human sentences, it’s inevitably going to take Gemini. It’s just a question of when you can get it.

Create your own commands with Automations

Until Gemini is broadly available as a voice assistant, we’re stuck trying to fit our requests into the narrow box of smart speakers. Fortunately, Google Home has a really handy tool to make them less cumbersome: Automations. In a dedicated tab in the Google Home app, you can create automations (called Routines) that trigger multiple, complex actions from simple phrases.

One of my favorites, I’ve created a routine that activates when I say, “Hey, Google: movie sign!” This little script will turn off the overhead lights in my living room, pause any smart speakers that happen to be playing music, and turn on the TV backlight. Normally, all of these would have to be individual commands, and while Google Assistant can sometimes handle multiple instructions at once, it can often fail. This way rarely does.

Routines have some built-in functions such as adjusting your smart home devices, playing certain media, sending texts, or even getting the weather. If there’s not already a preset action in the Routines menu, you can also add custom instructions. These will run as though you told Google Assistant to do them yourself. It’s handy if you need to run a command with a particular phrasing, but one that Google often misunderstands when spoken aloud.

Enable Voice and Face Match to get better results

Google advertises Voice Match as a way to get personalized results based on who’s asking a question. For example, if you say “What’s on my calendar?” you can get a rundown from your personal Google account, but someone else in your household will get theirs (and guests can’t access anyone’s calendar). While that’s well and good, personally I find this feature useful for a much different reason: it can help Google know what each person in your house sounds like. 

Any household with both masculine and feminine voices is familiar with this particular failure. Someone with a feminine voice says “turn on kitchen…turn on kitchen…turn on kitchen!” Then the masculine voice, from across the room, bellows, “Turn on kitchen.” And that one works.

There are complicated reasons for this—which can range from simple coincidence to how microphones pick up higher and lower frequencies—but Voice Match can sometimes (sort of) help with this. While it doesn’t magically make the device’s microphone better, or make it easier to distinguish a voice from background noise, it can help Google decide better how to handle commands.

For example, two people who each have Voice Match set up on the same device can set different default music services. Similarly, recommendations based on previous activity will be tailored to that person’s profile, rather than all activity going through one account.

Now, this might be anecdotal, but I’ve found that this can even help with my partners’ voices not being recognized at all, like in the example above. Your mileage may vary, but in my experience, just having a voice model that Google recognizes as a specific user can result in the speaker distinguishing them from background noise.

Choose your other smart device names carefully

Most smart home gizmos will run you through the process of setting up and naming your devices, often by labeling them based on what room they’re in. In isolation, that’s not really a problem. It’s once you start combining multiple products that things get messy.

It took me a while to figure this out when my Nest speaker started telling me that it turned “three devices off” when I asked it to “turn off kitchen.” See, we only have two Philips Hue lights in there. After a couple weeks of confusion, I realized that my partner had recently set up a Pura smart fragrance diffuser. This was also put in the “kitchen” category, which meant I was turning off the air freshener every time I asked Google to dim the lights.

This can be tricky because the Google Home app organizes devices by room, which means you can expect to be turning off all devices in that room, but if a device has the same name as just one room, Assistant can get confused. An easy way to avoid this is to use clear, unique names for each device, be careful about how you organize devices into rooms (both in their respective apps and Google Home itself), and choose names that work for how you’re likely to identify a device out loud. This is also where custom commands can come in handy, if your naming schemes get too difficult.

Turn on the start sound

This one is so simple it feels like it should be the default. Normally, when you say “Hey Google” to your smart speaker or display, it will light up and start listening, but if you’re not looking directly at it, you might not notice. However, you can set it to make a small ding so you know it’s listening.

To enable this, open up the Google Home app and find the device you want to make noise. Tap it and select Settings. Under Accessibility, enable the “Play start sound” toggle. Now, as soon as you say “Hey Google,” you’ll hear a ding sound, so you know it’s listening.

It’s a little thing, but that feedback can be super helpful. It instantly lets you know if your smart speaker just didn’t hear you at all, so you don’t waste time with your full command before you realize what’s happening. It can also help diagnose when something else is the problem. If you hear the ding and then say your command, you know Google picked it up, but it might be struggling to access the internet, or misheard the command.

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I use apps for everything from obtaining free stuff to making extra income. I also use them for some extra help on the health and fitness journey I’ve been undertaking for the last year and a half. I was always active—I teach spin classes, consistently ride my Peloton, and have always frequented the gym—but something really took hold of me at the end of 2023 and made me want to get, like, super active. Naturally, I downloaded all the apps I thought could help me as I set out to keep track of my protein intake, devise the perfect schedule of workout splits, and monitor all my biodata. Here are the ones that actually helped me.

For cardio: The Peloton app

You don’t need a Peloton Bike, Tread, or Row to enjoy the benefits of the Peloton app, which I’ve written about before. For about $24 per month, you can access cycling, rowing, and running classes that work just fine on non-Peloton equipment, plus walking, yoga, stretching, and even meditation classes. I follow along with these all the time, like when I’m walking outside, running on a treadmill at the gym, or just sitting in my living room, since the app works not only on my iPhone, but on my Roku, too.

I like this app a lot better than having to always come up with my own cardio routine or following the advice of a random fitness influencer—the variety is massive and the instructors are so professional. With the big-name brand comes expertise and some assurance that you’re actually getting useful, efficient, and safe instruction. The instructors’ cues are always clear and direct, new classes get uploaded every day, and I feel like I get a lot more out of this than I would if I just hopped on a rowing machine and worked out based on my own mood.

For strength training: Strong

Peloton also has a Strength+ app that I really enjoy, but if I had to choose between that or Strong as my preferred weight-lifting helper, I’d go with Strong. Available on iOS and Android, the app relatively bare-bones, which is why I like it. It keeps track of my lifts, allowing me to enter in the exercise I’m doing, the weight I’m using, how many sets and reps I’m doing, and whether or not I do a drop set or train to failure. It then keeps track of all that information so the next time I go to do, say, a lat pulldown, Strong tells me how many reps and sets I did last time and what weight I used.

I used to keep track of this information in a note on my phone, then move it into a spreadsheet when I got home. This was unbelievably ineffective. Strong keeps track of the frequency of my workouts, links to my Apple Health seamlessly, and comes with extra features I don’t even use, like a tab to jot down the circumference of various body parts as they ideally grow and change. I happily pay $29.99 per year to unlock unlimited custom routines, but you can use the free version if all you want is to mark down a few details about your workouts.

For nutrition: Lifesum

I am a Millennial woman and, as such, have put in my time in the MyFitnessPal trenches for well over a decade. That app has had its claws in my generation for far too long and a few months ago, I finally broke free when I switched over to Lifesum. It was like a totally different world.

MFP has had and still has a lot of features that nutrition pros and eating disorder advocates worry are a little dangerous, like a pop-up notification that tells you what you’d weigh in five weeks if you consistently ate the same amount of calories you ate that day and numbers that turn red when you’ve exceeded your calorie goal for the day. Lifesum, on iOS and Android, is much gentler than that and is focused more on whole nutrition than a simple, calorie-based model. When I exceed my calorie goal for the day, there is no red number making me feel bad; the pastel rainbow background is as soothing and encouraging as it is on a day I eat at my goal.

When you sign up for Lifesum, you take a quiz to get a “life score” and it asks you about how much you tend to eat from different categories, like seafood and fruit. You set macronutrient goals, activity goals, and calorie goals, but the app is not pushy if you don’t meet them on a given day. You are not rewarded for maintaining a “streak.” The whole thing is so pleasant that it actually encourages me to use it, which is hardly a difficult chore because Lifesum gives you plenty of options for use: I have a widget on my phone that lets me input water intake and track my macros without opening the app, I can use my camera lens as a barcode scanner or to snap a pic of my meal and let the app estimate the calories, or I can type what I ate into an AI chatbox (as descriptively as possible) and allow the app to estimate my calories and nutrients based off that. My Apple Health data, including my workouts and my weight, is entered in for me and Lifesum adjusts my recommended intakes based on that information and the goals I set. It’s $99.99 per year, $29.99 every three months, or $7.49 per month.

Other phone-based fitness considerations

I like to let my phone and other devices do a lot of work for me when I can, so I’m constantly wearing my Apple Watch, which delivers data on how much I’m walking, standing, moving, sleeping, and generally exerting straight to my Apple Health app, which in turn spreads that information over to Lifesum and my other apps. I also use a smart scale to weigh myself and that, too, delivers information for Apple Health to spread around. You can absolutely get too into monitoring your own progress and fitness, so I recommend only getting these sorts of devices if you can exercise some reasonable caution, but overall, the ability to track and access data without doing too much work is really helpful. This is the scale I use, and I love it:

All of this said, you don’t want to spend too much time fiddling with your phone—especially during mealtime or when you’re at the gym. The apps above are not time-suckers; Lifesum, especially, works really quickly thanks to its barcode scanner and picture-assessing capabilities. Still, don’t get so wrapped up in tracking and planning that you neglect the actual eating or exercising. A simple workaround here is the Steppin app, which works with your phone’s pedometer and blocks pre-determined apps, only letting you access them if you are willing to trade time you earned by walking. If you’re finding you spend a little too much time poring over your nutrition app or scrolling fitness influencers’ pages without actually replicating the exercises they’re showing you, Steppin can provide a happy medium, cutting off your app access and encouraging you to get your steps in.