Making a new feature for a streaming music app is impossible without considering Spotify, which dominates the market with 500 million subscribers. Other apps are always catching up to Spotify Connects long range of essential features, which enable you to easily adjust music as you switch between devices. To make Google Cast devices like the Nest Audio easier to handle, YouTube Music has been working diligently on this front and is now exploring a solution.
When you put in a command for Google Assistant to enable smart speakers to play music by voice, opening the app on your device will automatically connect the speaker and provide you with efficient control over volume and playlist. For this purpose, both devices need to be on the same network and will recognize within seconds that something is playing and initiate it further with a Google Cast connection. But it’s sort of a seamless connection otherwise.
Once connected, it seems as though you had started playback on the speaker using the cast button on YouTube Music on your phone. Your phone’s volume rocker will manage the speaker volume, the media controls in Android’s Quick Settings panel will display what is now playing on the speaker, and you can even go to YouTube Music’s Up Next tab to view upcoming songs in the playlist. Prior to this, it was not possible because the Google Home app’s media controls didn’t display the songs that would play next.
On the other hand, this feature might cause issues in other scenarios, such as if something is already being played on the speaker when you open the app. It will override the already-playing song and can mess up an already-setup playlist being played from your device.
The functionality was spotted by a few Reddit users today, and we can confirm it is functional in YouTube Music app version 6.03.52. It’s possible that this is a server-side modification that is still being implemented, so not all YouTube Music accounts may have access to it just yet. It’s still encouraging to see YouTube Music catch up to Spotify.
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