Google Home finally adds support for buttons

Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally added support for buttons. The release notes for a February 2 update state that several new starter conditions for automations are now available, including “Switch or button pressed.”

Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or control devices in your smart home, such as turning lights on or off, opening and closing shades, running a Good Night scene, or starting a robot vacuum.

A great alternative to voice and app control when you want to control multiple devices, smart buttons are often wireless and generally have several ways to press them: single press, double press, and long press, meaning one button can do multiple things.

Most smart home platforms support using buttons to control connected devices, including Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and Home Assistant. With the arrival of Matter, an interoperability standard for connected devices, it’s become easier to control all of your devices with buttons (called a generic switch in the Matter spec).

However, Google Home has frustratingly not had this functionality — until now. The release notes specify that the following function is now supported in the Google Home app (but not by Ask Home or Help Me Create, Google’s Gemini for Home-powered automation features):

“Switch or button is pressed**: e.g. “When double tapping the switch…”, “When holding down the button on a dimmer switch…”, or “When the button is released…” ** Available as a starter only:

Single or multi-press / Long press / Long press release

One reason Google may have finally made this move is the recent rollout of Ikea’s new Matter-over-Thread devices. This includes the $6 Bilresa, a wireless button that comes in two form factors: with two buttons or with a scroll-wheel button.

While smart buttons are very useful, to date they’ve been somewhat niche — mainly because they’re relatively expensive ($20 to $50) and mostly connected to proprietary ecosystems or hub-based protocols such as Zigbee or Z-Wave. With Matter, the need for a dedicated hub to connect a button to your smart home platform has been removed, and at $6, Ikea’s new buttons are super affordable.

This should open up the fun and functionality of buttons to more smart home users. With Ikea’s vast user base now potentially poised to embrace the smart home, Google needed to step up its support.

Google is bringing a few other automation improvements with its latest update, including the ability to run an automation when a robot vacuum is docked, when humidity reaches a specific level, and when the battery state or binary state (closed or opened, contact or no contact, leak or no leak) for a device changes.

The February 2 release also claims to bring a “foundational fix” for a recurring “Video not available” error in the Google Home app when attempting to play back videos.