Google Home is finally doing the thing power users have been yelling about for years: you can now use physical smart buttons as proper triggers in automations.

Until now, there was this weird disconnect in Google’s smart home story. You could add Matter buttons and switches to your home, but they were basically decorative if you lived inside Google’s ecosystem – visible in the app, yet unable to actually trigger anything beyond their own built‑in behavior. The new Google Home app update (version 4.8, rolling out now) changes that by letting “switch or button is pressed” act as a starter in automations, with support for single‑press, multi‑press, long‑press, and long‑press release.

In practice, that means you can finally do the obvious stuff. Stick an inexpensive IKEA BILRESA button near the door and use a single tap to turn off every light in the apartment, a double‑tap to start a “movie night” scene, and a long‑press to shut down everything and arm your security devices before bed. For renters who can’t swap out wall switches, this is huge: instead of relying only on voice commands or digging through the Google Home app, you can slap a battery‑powered button over the dumb switch and get something that feels like a native, physical control again.

Google is treating button presses as “starters” only, which is smart from a usability standpoint. In the automation editor, you’ll see options like “When double tapping the switch…” or “When holding down the button on a dimmer switch…”, and from there you can chain actions across your entire home – lights, plugs, speakers, vacuums, whatever the button is allowed to talk to. It’s still early days: for example, 9to5Google notes that IKEA’s BILRESA buttons didn’t immediately work in their testing, and scroll‑wheel style inputs for dimming aren’t supported yet, so expect some rough edges as vendors and Google line everything up.

The smart button story is part of a broader push to make Google Home automations feel less like a toy and more like a real rule engine. Alongside buttons, Google is adding new automation starters and conditions, including:

• Humidity reaching a specific level – for example, “When the humidity is above 60%…” to kick on a dehumidifier or turn on a bathroom fan.
• Robot vacuum docking – so when your vacuum returns to its dock, you could pause a “cleaning in progress” scene, resume regular lighting, or reduce fan noise.
• Battery status on devices – such as “If the battery is charging…” or “When the battery is low…”, handy for sending alerts or turning on a nearby light when a critical sensor needs attention.
• Binary states – things like “If there’s a leak…” or “If the window is open…”, with specific states such as closed/open, contact/no contact, freeze/no freeze, and leak/no leak.

In other words, Google is quietly giving you the pieces to make your home react to what’s actually happening, instead of just running scenes on a fixed schedule. Imagine a bathroom routine that only kicks on the fan when humidity spikes after a shower, or a leak sensor that not only sends a notification but also turns on the nearest lights and flashes a colored bulb in the hallway.

On the action side, smart lights get a long‑overdue upgrade too: automations can now set lights to specific colors or color temperatures, like “set the living room light to blue” or “set the bedroom light to a warm white.” That sounds small, but it’s the difference between a boring on/off schedule and a living room that automatically shifts from cool, bright white in the morning to warm, cozy tones at night, all driven by the same automations that your new buttons can trigger.

If you’ve been burned by Google Home’s reliability in the past, especially with Nest Cams randomly throwing “video not available” errors, there’s a bit of good news in this update as well. Google says it’s rolling out a “foundational fix” for those long‑running camera issues alongside the new automation tricks. Coupled with earlier improvements like faster, more reliable local control for Matter lights, plugs, and switches on Android, the company is clearly trying to address the “it’s cool when it works” reputation that has dogged Google’s smart home efforts.

It’s also worth remembering how we got here. When Google first shipped its revamped automation editor, it was clearly labeled as a work in progress: some device types weren’t supported, colors and effects for lights were missing, and many of the richer conditions were still on the roadmap. Over the past year or so, Google has gradually layered in conditions like presence, time of day, and device status, and now it’s finally closing a glaring gap by treating physical buttons as true first‑class citizens.

From a broader smart home perspective, the timing lines up neatly with Matter’s slow but steady march across devices. Matter‑based buttons have been multiplying from brands like IKEA and others, and until now, Google Home’s stance was effectively, “Sure, we’ll onboard them, but you can’t really do much with them.” With this update, those little pucks and paddles finally become meaningful: a single piece of plastic can now be the front‑end to whatever level of automation you’re comfortable with – from basic “lights on, lights off” to routines that talk to vacuums, sensors, and more.

There are still caveats. These new starters, conditions, and actions live in the Google Home app’s automation editor and aren’t yet supported by “Ask Home” or the “Help me create” assistant‑driven automation tools, so if you like to build routines by talking to your phone, you’ll need to get hands‑on in the editor for now. And as always, rollout is gradual, so you might not see every option immediately, especially if you’re not on the latest app version or if Google is gating features by region or by device type.

Still, if you’ve been on the fence about smart buttons because Google Home treated them like second‑class citizens, this is the update that changes the equation. Once it lands on your phone, the most practical next step is simple: pick one room, grab a cheap Matter‑compatible button, and map it to the three things you do most often in that space – lights, a favorite scene, maybe a “shut everything down” macro – and see how quickly you stop reaching for your phone or shouting at a speaker.