Your Honeywell Lyric thermostat just got smarter as the company announced a partnership with Google to integrate a number of their popular thermostats into the Google Home smart hub system. The announcement comes as a bit of a surprise as Google seemed reluctant to work with other thermostat manufacturers that compete with their Nest Learning Thermostat. Honeywell’s Total Connect Comfort models have worked with Google’s smart speaker for some time now, but are not considered “smart thermostats”..
The move is one in a long line of integrations the “Work with Honeywell” program has made over the past couple years. Google Home will now join Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings, and IFTTT in working with the Lyric line. The affected thermostats include the Lyric Round, Lyric T5, and Lyric T6 pro models. The move does not change any current setup you may have. Honeywell will continue to offer their Lyric app for free on both iOS and Android.
Google Home is a smart speaker hub released in November 2016 by Google in an effort to compete with Amazon’s popular smart speaker, Alexa. The Honeywell integration will allow users of both devices to control their thermostat by speaking commands such as “Ok Google, change the temperature to 70 degrees”. You will also be able to control your thermostat using the Google Assistant on current Android devices.
The move should be seen as a positive to consumers. Honeywell’s impressive list of collaborators grows and has made their smart thermostats an intriguing alternative to the more popular Nest and ecobee solutions. Google Home integrates another major consumer product line into their system in an effort to catch up with competitors who have had a head start. We are crossing our fingers that ecobee integration will be coming soon.
