With the data available in Google Sheets there are a number of enhancements that one could make to this application using Google Apps Scripts, for example: This was the one that seemed to offer exactly what I wanted… If you look here you will find a number of applets that work with Google Assistant and thus Home (remember Home is running Google Assistant). In this situation it can bizarrely be used to hook up Google products better than Google can itself right now. This allows a user to create powerful automated actions that can span multiple devices. For those unacquainted, IFTTT is glue that hooks together fragmented IoT services that are being offered by a number of major manufacturers. Thankfully one of the saving graces of Home right now is the excellent integration with If This Then That (IFTTT) which does work for those of us here in the UK.
Home comes with some embedded services that can be activated on your mobile, such as Spotify but additional user-made services are not yet available for UK users which is frustrating a number of new British adopters including myself. On Google Home these are called ‘services’. Those familiar with Amazon Alexa will know that ‘apps’ are referred to as ‘skills’. I started by searching for an ‘app’ that would covert speech to text and record it with a time stamp. My wife, being more of a traditionalist than myself, was keen to capture these events in a notebook, however I saw an opportunity for a practical use- a case for my newly acquired Google Home after all your hands are pretty busy when you have a baby so would it not be great to take notes using voice recognition, which Google has become exceptionally good at recently.
All this information proved useful during visits by a midwife and a health visitor, who were trying to establish the bigger picture of how the baby was progressing. Whilst I was initial dubious about the need to capture all this data it became evident that having it was better than not as we tried to establish patterns and frankly our memory welcomed some support as days and nights blurred into one. These events could be: when the baby was last napped, length of the nap, when some medication was given, if recently fed then how much did she take etc. One of the things that become apparent, aside from saying farewell to uninterrupted sleep, is the need to track events between us relating to our new baby.
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