The Google-powered smart display in your kitchen or bathroom or bedroom or office is scheduled to pick-up a brand new UI at some point in the near future. Today, Google announced that smart displays like the Google Nest Hub or Hub Max will have dedicated pages for each type of action you might want to complete.
As you can see in the images here, smart displays will soon show a UI with “Your morning,” “Home control,” “Media,” “Communicate,” and “Discover” tabs, all of which should provide pretty self explanatory information.
In the new “Your morning” tab, this page will not only show you the weather for the day, it’ll highlight your first meeting, possibly help you set something like a timer, and let you control devices within the area the display sits. Since the entire day is made up of more than a morning, it will evolve as the day goes on to “Your afternoon” and “Your evening.”
The most important new addition for those of us who have lots of smart home gadgets is going to be in the “Home control,” where you get an entire page dedicated to smart home controls.
There’s a new “Media” page that shows podcasts or TV shows or other recommendations from connected services, a “Communicate” tab for calling folks on Meet or Duo or by broadcasting messages in your house, and a “Discover” tab that should help you get more out of your smart display.
In addition to the new UI, Google is added a dark theme, a shortcut to play relaxing sounds at night, a sunrise alarm like we already have on the Pixel Stand, and auto-framing with Google Meet and Nest Hub Max. Google is also letting you have access to all of your Google accounts in one place, with both work and personal Google accounts on your smart displays.
Google didn’t give a precise date for any of this, so we’ll just assume it’s slowly rolling out now. If it all looks familiar, that’s because we first saw a preview of it about a month ago.