Google’s Nest speakers are ideal for anyone looking to set up a proper smart home, with the tightest integration you could imagine with Google Assistant and Google Home.
One massive benefit to having a bunch of smart speakers (and normal speakers, too) dotted around your home is the ability to use multi-room audio to play music and other audio in multiple places at once. Here’s how to get that working with Google Home.
How to set up multi-room audio for Google Nest speakers
There is a wide range of devices that you can use to play multi-room audio through Google. The first step is to create a speaker group, as follows.
How to create a speaker group on Google Home
- Connect to the same Wi-Fi network as the speakers in question
- Open the Google Home app
- Tap the Settings cog, then tap Add (+), then tap on Speaker Group
- Tick each speaker that you want in the group
- Tap Next, then enter a name for the speaker group
- Tap Save to finish
This will leave you with a speaker group that you can send music and audio to.
Send audio to a speaker group
You’ll probably want to know how to actually go about doing that bit, too. Here are the steps.
- Start playing music or media on whatever service you like
- Open the Google Home app while the audio is playing
- Tap on the currently playing media in the app
- Select the playback device you’d like – on this list, you should see the speaker group you’ve connected
This should send your audio or music to the speaker group of your choice. Bear in mind that you can create multiple groups with different combinations of speakers, so you should be able to create a bunch of permutations that let you choose different setups.
What Google devices work with multi-room audio?
In order to work with its multi-room audio setup, you have to be able to add a speaker to a Google speaker group using the steps above. For Google’s own in-house hardware, the following devices are compatible with speaker groups:
- Google Home
- Google Nest Mini (2nd gen)
- Google Home Mini (1st gen)
- Google Home Max
- Google Nest Audio
- Google Nest displays
- Google Nest Wifi point
- Google Pixel Tablet (in Hub Mode only)
- Chromecast with Google TV
- Chromecast
- Chromecast Ultra
- Chromecast Audio
- Speakers with Chromecast Built-In
If you’re keen-eyed, that list of Chromecast options (including Built-In) should catch your eye – this massively widens out the pool of available speakers. Firstly, there are a host of great smart speakers out there with Chromecast built into them, and they should all work.
Secondly, you can plug your Chromecast (whichever generation it is) into a really wide range of devices to get even more support, making the list of potential devices practically endless.