The original Google Home was announced last year as a direct competitor to the Amazon Echo, and while it wasn't nearly as feature-packed as the latter at launch, it has steadily improved its capabilities over the past year, and is currently a of the best smart speakers money can buy. In fact, the company recently also launched a pair of new home devices, the Home Max and Home Mini, both of which are also powered by the company's AI-based software, Google Assistant. So if you're planning to get one of the new Google Home smart speakers or already have the older one but want to know more about how to get the most out of it, here are the top 20 Google Home tricks you should know about:

Now tap on the name that you want to change and enter any name. Remember to press "OK" to save the change. As you can see, we chose to rename our 'Office Home' to 'Beebom Home' and it worked exactly as expected. You can also choose to rename your Chromecast devices using the exact same method.

While Google Assistant on your phone only recently gained the ability to control Chromecast devices, Home was blessed with the feature right from the start. It's one of the best features of Google Home and one that plays to the strengths of the Chromecast platform. With Google Home's Chromecast integration, you can issue voice commands to control playback, skip songs, pause, resume, stop, change the volume, and so on. It works with both audio and video, and you can specify which Chromecast device you want to send your media to.

The smart home concept envisioned by most sci-fi movie directors is far from reality today, so you have to keep tweaking a few things here or there to make everything work the way you want it to. That's exactly where IFTTT comes in. You can use the service to make your Google Home communicate with other smart devices even when they are not officially compatible with each other.