Use the Google Home app as a touch remote control for your Xbox console.
Since 2019, you’ve been able to control your Xbox console using voice commands with Google Assistant. Today, we’ve partnered with Google so that you can use the Google Home app as a touch remote control for your Xbox console. Now, when you add your Xbox console to your Google Home app, you’ll be able to easily turn your console on and off, navigate on-screen, control media playback, and more. You can use the Google Home app to command your Xbox like you do for other Smart Home devices.
To get started, go to the Google Home app on your phone. Pull down to refresh your devices and tap on your Xbox console to bring up the touch controls. Remote control features include: power on/off, directional navigation, navigate home, navigate back, play/pause, skip/previous, volume up/down, mute/unmute, and record game clip.
Hopefully whatever Google is using becomes available for non-google integrations, it might make for more responsive remote input to an Xbox.
Note the picture elements card example that gives someone a ‘touch remote’ to ‘control an XBox console’
So while it’s cool that GH can now do this - HA could do it a year ago if you set it up to do so. I am hoping though that the addition of this to GH, makes it more mainstream and thus spurs the XBL team to speed up whatever API they have in Azure that enables this. Unfortunately, the XBox integration seems a little slow sometimes, especially when updating media info in a media player entity based on the integration.
Yeah, I’m using that (and the picture elements card!), but it definitely feels clunky.
I was hoping that this might be a new/faster option that HA could also use.
All the features GH needed were already exposed in the public APIs through Azure (MSFT’s preferred endpoint for such things now). There’s practically ZERO chance that MSFT setup a separate private API for this considering it would require all of the same infrastructure. Separate competing PRODUCT - sure… …(cough RIP Yammer… Long live, Viva Engage - but I digress…)
Separate competing API? not right now, not in the current economic climate.
What I DO expect. If they advertise this to Google - the number of ‘casual’ users of the interface goes WAY up - and therefore any performance or functionality issues for the interface get exposed and fixed faster. MUCH faster.
That works just as well for me!
Just wish there was a way to integrate my 360s, but I imagine all the infrastructure for that went away with smartglass support.