Your Google Home is a great device for requesting the weather, setting alarms, controlling your smart home or even creating a network of connected speakers, but you might not have an extra Google Home speaker to create an awesome sound setup in your home or apartment. That’s fine: You can just route your music through any decent-sounding Bluetooth speakers you might have—who needs your Google speaker, after all?
Get your Bluetooth speaker and Google Home ready to connect
First, switch on your Bluetooth speaker and leave it in pairing mode. Then open the Google Home app and tap on the Google Home speaker you want to sync to your Bluetooth speaker. Tap on the Settings icon—the gear—in the top-right corner, and then scroll down and tap on “Default speaker.”
Tap “Pair Bluetooth speaker,” and your Google Home speaker will scan for your to-be-paired speaker.
When your Bluetooth speaker pops up, tap to select it, and then tap “Done.”
You’ll be returned to the previous screen, where you’ll want to make sure your newly added Bluetooth speaker is selected as your default. (You can change your default speaker—where the music comes out when you talk to this particular Google Home speaker—at any time.)
The next time you ask Google Home to play your favorite song, the music should come through your paired Bluetooth speaker. More Google Assistant-specific commands like “what’s the weather?” should come out of your Google Home speaker. Don’t forget that you still need to direct your voice commands to the actual smart speaker for any of this to work.
If you want to get wild, you can also add multiple Bluetooth speakers across separate rooms; follow this same process and pair each Bluetooth speaker to a separate Google Home device. Then, lump the Google Home speakers together as a group and set the group as the default target for your audio. It’s a more complicated way to get multi-room audio, but a decent option if your Bluetooth speakers sound way better than your Google Home speakers.
This story was originally published in 2018 by Jacob Kleinman and was updated on May 3, 2020 by Emily Long. Our updates include the following: revised the steps to match the current Google app interface, added screenshots, and rewrote the first paragraph.