Since joining the Pandora community, I have primarily listened to Pandora on a smart speaker such as Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home. Often times I have found these devices to have had difficulty in understanding and carrying out the commands issued to them in spite of both Pandora, Amazon, and Google’s endorsement and promotion of such commands.
When interacting with Amazon’s Echo, I have found it invaluable to be able to enact my desired changes through the Pandora section of the Alexa ap. Rather than, say, testing various verbal commands until just the right one successfully shuffles a specific station, I could just open the Alexa app, go to the Pandora section of the list of available streaming music services, and view all of my saved stations, playlists, and albums after selecting it. From there, I could adjust the playback of my content as desired!
I find that, by contrast, I am unable to control the playback of Pandora’s content via the Google Home app. I am given the opportunity to “open the app,” but doing so literally opens the Pandora app on my phone. It does not bring up a second screen ingratiated within the Google Home app featuring additional choices with which to adjust the mode and methodology of Pandora’s content playback on the Google Home device as the Alexa app did.
I feel that making this feature available in the Google Home app would not only give users greater options and range of motion with which to adjust their listening preferences, but serve as a possible means of circumvention around the miscommunication that can sometimes arise between the Google Home and Pandora. For this reason, I encourage Pandora to explore mirroring their inter-operability with the Alexa app in relation to the Google Home app.
