This Google Home upgrade makes it easy to share your smart devices with family and guests

Google Home has just introduced a new upgrade that makes it easier to share access to your smart home devices with people who live and visit your household. The update has added ‘Admin’ and ‘Member’ roles which are available on the 3.33 version of the Google Home app.

If you have multiple people living in your home, or your friend is housesitting while you’re away, you may want to grant them permanent or temporary access to your smart devices. Seeing this as a recurring request, Google Home has added the ability for users to do that in this new app update.

On the Google Home app, users can now assign people with ‘Admin’ or ‘Member’ roles. As you’d expect, the ‘Admin’ role gives full control over all your smart home devices, settings, automations and other services. Admins can also tag or assign people as Members.

A ‘Member’ role has a more restricted access to your smart home devices so they can’t access all settings but can do basic tasks like turning lights on and off. Users can give Members additional privileges in the settings of the Google Home app, so they can have more control over certain devices and activity access, so they can check in on footage and events captured by a video doorbell.

Aside from ‘Admin’ and ‘Members’, this Google Home app upgrade also gives access to children under 13. This is called Family Link, and allows you to set up your child with a Google account, where you can then invite them to use Google Home. Due to age restrictions, the Family Link feature automatically adds them as a ‘Member’ so they have limited access to your devices.

Google Home’s ‘Member’ access has been in testing since December last year, but this new update means these features are now available to all users who have version 3.33 of the Google Home app.