Google has announced its recently released Nest Audio speakers, the Nest Hub Max and Nest Mini, all now support Apple Music via voice commands.
This means Apple Music users of any of these Google-made speakers will be able to ask Google Assistant to play songs by artist, song or playlist.
To get this feature to work, you need to first link your Apple Music account to the Google Home app. Further, you also need to set Apple Music as your default music streaming service. After that, you’ll be able to play music with voice commands like, “Hey Google, play my songs,” or “Hey Google, play Blink-182,” just like you can with other music streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music.
Before this update, the only way to stream tracks from Apple Music was via Bluetooth since the Nest Audio and Google’s other smart speakers aren’t compatible with Apple’s AirPlay 2 wireless protocol.
While it’s possible to play Spotify content on Apple’s HomePod speakers through AirPlay 2, Siri still doesn’t natively support the service via voice commands. While Apple opened up this feature to third-party music services months ago at this point, Spotify hasn’t opted to support it on the HomePods. On iOS you can use Siri to search for songs on Spotify you just need to add the words “on Spotify” to the end of your request.
That said, given that the music streaming giant calls Apple’s ‘One‘ subscription bundles “anti-competitive,” it isn’t surprising that it’s holding out from the HomePods.
What’s most interesting about this shift is it’s yet another example of Apple’s walled-garden approach to hardware and software slowly crumbling.
Apple Music costs $9.99 per month and is available on iOS, Android and desktop.
Source: Google
