Surrounding today’s technology, Privacy is a major concern of people and so much so that Google has even implemented a new feature to protect users’ information when accessing the company’s popular and useful voice assistant. Google’s Assistant already had several privacy-focused features, that includes options to manage and turn on and off audio recordings, the ability to ask Google Assistant to remove or everything that has been said in the past Google’s new feature aims to protect users’ information from the people they invite into their homes.
The company has started rolling out Google Guest mode on Assistant-powered smart speakers and smart displays after following an announcement in October. The function ensures that your Assistant interactions are not saved into your Google account. In addition to this, Google Assistant will not show the personalized search results when you are logged in as Guest. In this guide, we will brief you on How To Use Google Assistant as Guest?
What Is Google Assistant Guest Mode?
Four years ago, Google Assistant was unveiled to the world and, after some time it was incorporated into smartphones and smart home devices. The voice assistant has a wealth of voice-controlled capabilities, it ranges from playing music to controlling other smart devices in your home. And since Google’s collection of smart speakers and displays is growing continuously with amazing products like the Nest Audio and Nest Hub Max, it is becoming increasingly easy to set up the Google Assistant in every room in your house.
“Google Guest Mode” main motivation is to turn your nest hub, Nest Mini, Google Home or smart speaker Google Assistant into a public device. It turns off access to any personal results and does not save queries to your Google account. It is the same in a web browser as “Incognito Mode.”
When a user sets up a device such as a Google Assistant smart speaker, you can turn on the “personal results.” This would mean that when the person asks for certain things, the Assistant will gather information from their Google Calendar, shopping lists, Gmail, and other accounts that are associated with them.
This “Voice Match” function is intended to prevent others from accessing these personal results, but it is not perfect. The other problem is that any command given to the smart speaker that is not personal will still be recorded to your Google account. The “Guest Mode” solves these issues.
Features
- It has media controls, smart home controls and localized search results
- The actions in routines without personal results
- There are many announcement features like Broadcast and Family Bell
- It provides calls to household contacts
- It has photos from photo frame on smart displays
- You must try Guest Mode on Smart Speakers for Better Privacy
Guest mode is a pretty neat and privacy-friendly addition to smart speakers and smart displays with Google Assistant. You should consider giving it a try if you own a smart home device with the Assistant.
How to Turn on Guest Mode?
Google Assistant-enabled smart speakers and smart displays support the Guest Mode. Unfortunately, this function is not available on the Google Assistant found on Android phones, tablets, iPhones, or iPads.
If you want to turn on Guest Mode, you need to simply say “Hey Google, turn on guest mode.” Your ears will hear a chime, and Guest Mode will be turned on. It is worth noting that guest mode will be turned on until you turn it off again.
What Happens When The Guest Mode Is Turned On?
When you choose to turn on the guest mode, Google is not going to save your audio recordings and Assistant interactions such as voice commands that you issue. This happens even if you have chosen to save your Assistant interactions on your desired Google account. Another important benefit of guest mode is the fact that it will not show personal results, for instance, your calendar events. Guest mode is a nifty addition for those who use Google Calendar to manage events.
On the other side, other services of Google like Maps or YouTube may still use your activity if you have enabled the activity history on those services. The same state, EMT holds when you use Assistant with the third-party apps. As a result, the videos that your guests watch will end up in your YouTube watch history.
In case you do not want that to happen at all, you can simply disable web & app activity, your location history, and even the YouTube history from Google’s My Activity page. While you are there, we would also strongly recommend you to set up an auto-delete for web and location history and take a deeper look at all the Google Assistant settings you should change.
How can you Turn off Guest Mode?
As you might have guessed, turning off Guest Mode works, in the same way, the Turning on works.
You need to simply say “Hey Google, turn off guest mode.” Again, you will hear a chime on the device, and Google Guest Mode will end.
You must note that while Guest Mode is like “Incognito Mode” in a web browser, it is not as robust as that. The speaker will be still connected to your Google account and any other integrations that you might have set up. This includes music apps and smart home devices. Also, anyone can use the above-mentioned command to turn off Guest Mode.
Guest Mode is created for the purpose being used when you have guests over at your house with you. It should not be used as a security feature when you are far away from home. With those limitations kept in mind, it is still a pretty handy feature.
Conclusion
The Google Assistant is a heart tool for several Android users. It helps you to use your voice commands to call someone, send a message to someone, or even open an app, and more. Along with the upcoming new Guest mode, the search engine giant has also added critical Security Alerts within Google Apps. Google has also refreshed the Safety Centre where you can simply see all security-related information for your account in one place. So this was our guide on how to use Google Guest Mode, we hope it has been proved to be useful for you.
Latest Articles