File photo: Google Home is displayed during the presentation of new Google hardware in San Francisco, California, U.S. October 4, 2016. (REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach)
Google Assistant can now lend a hand in the kitchen, assuming that's where you've placed your Google Home speaker.
An update rolling out to all users this week will give the digital voice assistant access to more than 5 million recipes from Bon Appetit, The New York Times, Food Network, and other sources, and it can read them all back to you step by step.
If you want to search through all 5 million, you'll first want to select a recipe via web search on your iOS or Android device, or via the Google Assistant if your phone has it built in. Once you've found the one you want, tap the "Send to Google Home" button so it knows what you want to cook. You can also ask Google Home for some recipes directly, such as "Ok Google, let's make macaroons."
Once you've got all the ingredients ready, you can say "Ok, Google, start cooking." You can then ask Google Home to move on to the next step in the recipe, or to repeat the instructions for a specific step. In between, you can set timers with your voice and also ask all manner of questions that an experienced assistant should know the answer to, such as how many ounces are in a cup.
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Of course, given a choice between cooking dinner with Google Home tonight or seeing the hit musical Hamilton, it's a safe bet that most people would chose the latter. And while asking Google Home for tickets isn't likely to work, the company on Wednesday made available a deluge of historical information about Alexander Hamilton's life to beef up your historical knowledge in case you do get to see the musical.
The collection, curated by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, includes six virtual reality tours of locations where the founding father spent his time, from his home in Manhattan to the site of the duel in Weehawken, N.J. where he died. The VR tours are available to students using VR headsets on the Google Expeditions platform, but the Institute has also uploaded much of its Hamilton collection for anyone to explore.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.
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