Google Home can help you in a pinch if you’re stuck on a crossword puzzle track.
Dale Smith / CNET
Google Home ($ 99 at Crutchfield) understands thousands of voice commandsBut did you know that it can help you win in Scrabble? Or if you’ve ever been stuck on a crossword puzzle hint, Google Home could take your breath away. And while it’s a no-brainer, Google Home can teach you how to spell almost any word in the lexicon, even the largest ones, like antidisestablishmentarianism.
But what if you don’t even know how to pronounce the third longest word in English, let alone what it means? Google Home can help you with all that, too. Google Home is packed with language skills that can help you spell or pronounce words, find definitions, synonyms, and antonyms, as well as translate to and from other languages.
And if you ask the right questions, Google Home can help you solve word puzzles, too. Here are five fun ways Google Home can help you explore words and languages, and maybe even improve your Scrabble game.
Ask Google Home to spell out even the most complicated words, such as anti-destablishmentarianism, and it will. Bonus if you have a Nest Hub or Nest Hub Max, which will display the word while reading its letters.
Dale Smith / CNET
1. Google Home can explain it to you
It is a Catch-22 practically as old as the language itself: if you cannot spell a word, you must search for it, but how do you search for it if you cannot spell it? Thanks to the wonders of speech recognition, Google Home can free you from this linguistic paradox.
From the simple (“Hey Google, how do you spell ‘weird'”) to the sublime (“transubstantiation”, “seraphim”, “Santeria”), Google Home can spell almost any word you throw at it if you just ask.
2. Google Home can also hear it
Google Home is just as good at solving the opposite problem, when you’ve found a word and have no idea how to say it, but you must be very precise when asking. The key to asking Google Home for the correct pronunciation of a word is: “OK, Google, how do you pronounce it …”, followed by a slow but constant spelling of the word (“CAT”, “DOG”, ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTA -RANISM “).
Stuck on a word you can’t pronounce? Write it down for Google Home to learn.
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The key here is that you should ask Google Home to “pronounce” the word. If you just ask, “How do you say [word]? “You may or may not get the answer you are looking for.
3. Google Home: Dictionary and Thesaurus
You have a little more leeway to ask Google Home for word definitions. You can say, “Hey Google, what’s the definition of ‘cat’?”, Or “What does antidisestablishmentarianism mean?” You can even ask bluntly, “OK Google, what is a pawn?”
The same goes for the thesaurus entries. For synonyms, you can ask: “What is another word for ‘squeeze?'” Or “What is another way of saying ‘love?'” For words with opposite meanings, simply say: “What is the opposite of ‘squeeze’? ? ‘”O” What words mean the opposite of’ love? ‘”Or” What are some antonyms of’ antidisestablishmentariansm? ‘”
Google Home has a translation mode for longer communication, but you can translate words and sentences on the go just by asking.
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4. Translate on the go with Google Home
Google Home Interpreter Mode is great for conversations across language barriers, but sometimes you may just need to know what one or two words mean in your native language, or how to say one or two native words in a Foreign language. If you don’t know what language an unknown word comes from, Google Home could solve it. Just say “Hello Google” and ask a question like this:
- “How do you say ‘thank you’ in Spanish?” (Answer: “Thank you”)
- “What does ‘dome arigato’ mean?” (Answer: it means “thank you” in Japanese).
- “How do you say, ‘Where’s the cafeteria?’ in French?” (Answer: “Où est le café?”)
5. Google Home can help with word games
Google Home has a dedicated Scrabble dictionary created by a third-party developer, but in our tests it incorrectly identified several words as invalid Scrabble moves (“homogeneous”, “misanthropic”, “hereditary”: 16, 21 and 17 points respectively, depending on the official online dictionary Hasbro Scrabble).
As long as there is disagreement among Scrabble players about the validity of a word, Google Home can check whether or not it is.
Sarah Tew / CNET
Instead, you better ask Google Home bluntly if the letter combination you want to use is really a word. For example, when asked “Is AP a word?” Google Home replied, “No, ‘ap’ is not in the Scrabble dictionary.” When asked, “APP is a word?” Google Home replied: “Here is the definition of an application: an application, especially one downloaded by a user to a mobile device,” confirming that it is, in fact, a word.
See this:
The best talent from Google Home allows you to customize the answers
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Google Home can also help with daunting crossword clues by giving you the clue plus how many letters you have to fill out. For example, say “OK, Google, what is a four letter word that means ‘cut'” and Google Home will generate a list, which includes “cut” and “cut”. Unfortunately, it can’t give you the letters you already filled out, for example if it starts with a “G”.
Google Home is not just a language teacher, it is math skills are without exception too. Of course, most people listen to music more than anything else they do with their Google Home speakers, so make sure configure your streaming services for the best listening experience. Speaking of settings, here they are five you won’t regret having changed.
Check out the newest Google Assistant products at CES 2020
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