Google Home Will Play Sound Effects When Reading Stories Aloud

The Google Home speakers, except the new Home Hub, are a bit of a puzzle. While they are a font of knowledge and power over your home, you might think them pretty boring in terms of entertainment value aside from music. Especially when it comes to kids that seem to gravitate more towards the visual things in life. But both as a sort of counterculture and proof that you can make magic just with sounds, Google and Disney have teamed up to make reading bedtime stories out loud a more memorable and enchanting experience, complete with matching sounds for scenes and moods.

Parents will no longer have to embarrass themselves by attempting to make believable sound effects on their own. Now they can just say "Hey Google, let's read along with Disney" to let the Google Home speaker make more convincing sounds. The smart speaker will take advantage of its patented speech recognition and AI abilities to determine where you're at in the story and play the appropriate sound bites to set the mood.

Despite the mesmerizing experience, you can expect kids to always interrupt (unless they're already fast asleep). Luckily, Google Home will also pause when you pause and resume when you start talking again. Even more magical, when you skip ahead or go back, it will skip and reverse course with you as well.

Of course, it doesn't just happen with any old story. It has to be one of the selections prepared and crafted by Disney for this particular use case. Titles include Moana, Toy Story 3, Coco, Jack Jack Attack, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, The Three Little Pigs, Mickey Mouse and his Spaceship, and, just in time for the holidays, Mickey's Christmas Carol. Find those compatible books in Walmart, Target, and Barnes & Noble alongside the Google Home Mini.