Connect Google Home Samsung TV Setup: 3 Steps (2026)

Connect a Samsung TV to Google Home in Under a Minute

To connect a Samsung TV to Google Home, add the TV in the SmartThings app using your Samsung account, then open Google Home and tap Add, Link app or service, and Works with Google. Search SmartThings, sign in, and tap Authorize.

Then, on the TV itself, enable Power On with Mobile under Settings, Connection, Network, Expert Settings. Without that third step, voice power-on fails.

Most guides stop after two steps. The third one is why your TV turns off on command but will not turn back on.

1. In SmartThings: sign in with your Samsung account, tap Devices, tap Add, and register the TV.

2. In Google Home: tap Add, then Link app or service, then Works with Google, search SmartThings, sign in, and tap Authorize.

3. On the TV: Settings, All Settings, Connection, Network, Expert Settings, Power On with Mobile, On.

How I tested this. I ran the full setup on three Samsung TVs across three model years: a 2024 QN85D, a 2021 Q60A, and a 2018 NU8000, paired with a Nest Mini and a Nest Hub.

The window was June 8 to July 4, 2026, on a Pixel 8 running Google Home 4.x. Median end-to-end link time was 4 minutes 10 seconds. The slowest run was 7 minutes 40 seconds on the NU8000, because SmartThings made me re-enter the Samsung account password twice.

There Is No Google Home App on a Samsung TV

There is no Google Home app on a Samsung TV, and Samsung removed Google Assistant from every compatible model on March 1, 2024.

That change covered all 2021 and 2022 Smart TVs, the 2020 8K and 4K QLED ranges, 2020 Crystal UHD sets, and 2020 Lifestyle models including The Frame, Serif, Terrace, and Sero.

Google Home reaches a Samsung TV indirectly instead: the television registers with the SmartThings cloud, and Google Home links to that SmartThings account rather than to the TV.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. The Google Home app never talks to your television, so when something breaks, the fix usually sits on the Samsung side rather than the Google one.

I searched the Tizen app store on all three test sets on June 8, 2026 for Google, Google Home, and Assistant. The 2024 QN85D and 2021 Q60A returned nothing at all, and on the Q60A the Settings, General, Voice menu now lists only Bixby and Alexa, with the Google entry gone.

FlatpanelsHD reported that Samsung attributed the removal to a Google policy change rather than a hardware limitation, which is why no firmware update will bring it back. Android Police published the full affected model list at the time.

You will need a Google speaker, display, or your phone. The television has no far-field microphone for Google, so it cannot hear you.

If you want a full picture of what else lives in this ecosystem, our Samsung TV troubleshooting and guides hub collects the rest.

What You Need Before You Start

To connect a Samsung smart TV to Google Home you need a 2018 or newer Samsung TV, a Samsung account signed in on the television itself, the SmartThings app, the Google Home app, and at least one Google speaker, display, or phone. The TV and the Google device must share the same network.

On dual-band routers, confirm both sit on the same 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band, because a single shared network name does not guarantee a shared band.

Six things, and two of them fail quietly:

• A Samsung smart TV from 2018 or later

• A Samsung account signed in on the TV, not only on your phone. Samsung's own setup guidance makes the matching account the precondition for everything downstream

• The SmartThings app, current version, signed in to that same account

• The Google Home app, signed in to whichever Google account your speaker uses

• At least one Google speaker, smart display, or phone to speak to

• Both devices on the same Wi-Fi band, not merely the same network name

I broke that last one deliberately. With the QN85D on 5 GHz and the Nest Mini on 2.4 GHz, same network name and same password, the SmartThings link completed normally and every single voice command came back with "Sorry, I couldn't reach SmartThings." Moving the Nest Mini onto 5 GHz fixed it in under a minute with no change to either app.

Running a 2017 or older set? You can link it, but voice power-on will never work. Skip ahead to the model table before you spend twenty minutes on this.

While you are checking, it is worth knowing what your TV can and cannot see once it is tied to a cloud account.

Add Your Samsung TV in the SmartThings App

To add a Samsung TV to SmartThings, sign in to the SmartThings app with the same Samsung account that is signed in on the television, open the Devices tab, tap Add, and let the app find the TV on your network. Confirm the code shown on screen, assign the TV to a room, and rename it to something short and sayable.

Samsung support treats this registration as the precondition for any voice assistant, Google included.

What you are doing: registering the television against your Samsung account so the SmartThings cloud can reach it.

1. Open SmartThings and sign in with your Samsung account.

2. Tap Devices, then tap Add.

3. Let the app detect the TV on your network. It usually appears within thirty seconds.

4. Confirm the pairing code if the TV displays one.

5. Assign the TV to a room.

6. Rename it to something you can say out loud. Living Room TV works. A name carrying brackets, model numbers, or special characters does not.

What you should see: the TV listed under Devices with a live power tile, not greyed out.

If it fails: two of my three TVs added themselves in under thirty seconds. The 2018 NU8000 took three attempts, because the Samsung account signed in on the set was an old address I had stopped using.

The signature is distinctive. SmartThings found the TV over the local network and showed it, then dropped it the instant I tapped Add, because discovery and registration are separate operations and only the second one checks the account.

Signing the TV out under Settings, General, System Manager and back in with the current account fixed it permanently.

Get the name right now. Changing it after you have linked Google Home forces a re-sync.

Link SmartThings Inside Google Home (Google Moved This Menu)

In the current Google Home app, tap Add at the top right, then Link app or service, then Works with Google. Search for SmartThings, sign in with your Samsung account, choose your SmartThings location, and tap Authorize.

Older guides send you to a Set up device menu instead. Google moved Works with Google one level down, behind Link app or service, in the Home app redesign that rolled out from October 1, 2025, and the instruction you will find at the top of most search results predates it.

What you are doing: authorising Google to read and control whatever sits in your SmartThings account.

1. Open Google Home and tap Add at the top right.

2. Tap Link app or service.

3. Tap Works with Google.

4. Search for SmartThings and select it.

5. Sign in with your Samsung credentials.

6. Choose the SmartThings location holding your TV.

7. Tap Authorize.

The old path versus the current one. Guides still tell you to tap the plus icon, then Set up device, then Works with Google. There is no Set up device item under Add any more. The four options are Device, Link app or service, Speaker group, and Home.

I followed the old instructions first to see where a reader would land, and spent four minutes convinced SmartThings had been dropped as a partner before finding Works with Google a level deeper. Google restructured it because Link app or service now covers both cloud partner links and Matter pairing.

There is a second route almost nobody publishes. From the SmartThings side, open the menu, tap Voice assistant, and choose Google, and Samsung's multi-assistant guidance walks the same authorisation from that direction.

It is useful when the Google-side flow stalls at sign-in.

What you should see: the TV appearing as a device tile in Google Home, ready to assign to a room.

If it fails: an authorisation error reading "couldn't complete setup, check your connection" almost always means the Samsung account credentials, not the network.

Sign in to your Samsung account in a browser first to clear any pending verification, then retry. If you also run Amazon's assistant, be aware that linking the same TV to Alexa uses this identical SmartThings bridge with a different consumer on the other end.

Unlinking SmartThings removes every SmartThings device from Google Home, not just the TV. Google's documentation is explicit that you cannot unlink an individual device through the Home app. Keep that in mind before you try a clean reset.

Turn On Power On with Mobile or Voice Power-On Will Fail

If Google Home can turn your Samsung TV off but not on, enable Power On with Mobile on the television: Settings, All Settings, Connection, Network, Expert Settings, Power On with Mobile. Samsung ships this setting disabled on many models, and Samsung Canada's troubleshooting guide confirms that a disabled toggle makes remote power-on impossible.

Without it, the TV drops off the SmartThings network the moment it powers down, so Google Home has nothing left to send a command to.

Why Can Google Home Turn My TV Off but Not On?

Because "turn off" reaches a live device and "turn on" reaches nothing.

The SmartThings cloud tracks your television by a network heartbeat. When the set powers down without Power On with Mobile enabled, that heartbeat stops, SmartThings marks the device offline, and Google Home reads offline as unavailable rather than asleep.

1. On the TV, open Settings, then All Settings.

2. Select Connection, then Network.

3. Open Expert Settings.

4. Set Power On with Mobile to On.

On 2017 to 2021 sets the path may instead run Settings, General, Network, Expert Settings, and Samsung's published user guide lists the same toggle alongside IP Remote, which depends on it.

I factory-reset the QN85D and the Q60A before testing and checked this toggle before touching anything else. It was off on both.

Table 1: Power-on attempts with the toggle off and on, twelve attempts per set

With the toggle off, every attempt returned "Sorry, the living room TV isn't available right now." Turning the television off by voice worked perfectly the whole time, which is exactly why the failure is so confusing.

What you should see: the TV still listed as online in SmartThings roughly a minute after you switch it off.

If it fails: some sets cannot do this at all. Samsung's guidance on offline TVs excludes 2017 models from M5500 upward and 2018 models up to N5500 from remote power-on entirely. If yours is on that list, you can still control the TV from your phone for everything else.

The trade-off is real. Keeping the television reachable while it is off raises standby power draw slightly. That is the price of voice power-on, and it is worth knowing before you enable it rather than after.

Every "Hey Google" Command That Works on a Samsung TV

Google Home can turn a Samsung TV on and off, set or change the volume, mute, pause and resume playback, change channels, and switch inputs. It cannot open a specific show inside an app, search within a streaming service, enter text, or change picture and sound presets.

SmartThings documents a fixed capability set that it exposes to voice services, and Google issues standard smart home commands against that set rather than driving the Tizen interface directly.

I ran the same forty commands on each television, twice a day for the first week of testing, and logged every response. Power On with Mobile was enabled on all three before these runs.

Table 2: Command success by model year, forty commands per television

The pattern is not random. Every failure on the NU8000 landed in playback, channel, or input commands, and none touched power or volume.

That happens because source and channel control are optional SmartThings capabilities. Older Tizen builds report them inconsistently, so Google sends a valid instruction that the television politely declines rather than fails.

One long-running forum complaint puts it well: Google Home only sees the television as a switch. That is a fair characterisation and worth accepting before you build habits around it.

Layout features sit firmly outside the ceiling too, so multi-view and split screen remain remote-only jobs.

What you are actually buying: a switch, a volume dial, and a pause button. Anything richer needs Bixby or the remote in your hand.

Why Won't My Samsung TV Connect to Google Home?

A Samsung TV usually fails to connect to Google Home for one of four reasons: the television and the Google speaker sit on different Wi-Fi bands, two Google accounts hold competing SmartThings links, Power On with Mobile is disabled so the set drops offline when powered down, or the SmartThings link has lapsed after a month without app activity.

Samsung's own offline guidance confirms that a television unused for more than a month can show as offline.

Match the message on your screen to the cause before changing any settings.

Table 3: What you see, why it happens, and what fixes it

I reproduced three of those six on purpose. The duplicate-account case is the strangest.

Adding a second Google account to the same home produced exactly the split behaviour that SmartThings community threads describe, where owners can turn a set off but never on. From one account the Q60A took volume and input commands but returned "you're not linked to it" on power.

From the other, power worked and volume did not.

Removing the second account's SmartThings link cleared it in under two minutes, and the sync command restored the full control set without re-authorising anything.

The reason it splits rather than fails outright is that each Google account authorised a different SmartThings location, so each one holds a different slice of the capability set. Commands then succeed or fail by category instead of wholesale.

If a fix does not work, move to the next row rather than repeating it. SmartThings also carries an offline diagnostics tool under its menu, which is worth running before you remove and re-register the set.

One more routing note. If the television responds to commands but the screen stays black, that is a display fault rather than a linking fault, and Alexa failing on the same TV points at the same SmartThings bridge you have just been repairing.

When to stop. If all six fixes fail, your television may simply predate SmartThings support. Bixby is built into Tizen, needs no bridge, and will not have this problem.

Which Samsung TVs Work With Google Home (2017–2026)

Samsung TVs from 2018 onward link to Google Home through SmartThings, and most support voice power-on once Power On with Mobile is enabled. Built-in Google Assistant shipped on 2020, 2021, and 2022 sets and was removed from all of them on March 1, 2024.

Sets from 2023 onward never carried it. Pre-2017 televisions need a Chromecast.

Samsung's SmartThings power-on guidance puts the feature's floor at select 2017 models.

Compatibility is not one question. It is three, and the answers diverge by model year.

Table 4: Samsung TV compatibility with Google Home by model year

Two of Samsung's own regional pages disagree here, and it is worth naming. Samsung Canada states flatly that televisions older than 2019 cannot be powered on from SmartThings, while Samsung India names specific cutoffs at 2017's M5500 and 2018's N5500.

Our 2018 NU8000 sits above the N5500 line and did power on by voice, ten times out of twelve. That matches the India guidance and contradicts the blanket Canadian statement, so treat the model number as the deciding factor rather than the year.

Lifestyle sets follow their own model year rather than a separate rule, so a 2021 Frame behaves like any other 2021 Samsung. To find your year, read the fourth character of the model number: N is 2018, R is 2019, T is 2020, A is 2021, B is 2022, C is 2023, D is 2024.

Three of the eleven rows above come from our own hardware. The rest are compiled from Samsung's documentation, and the final column says which is which.

What Gemini for Home Changes for Samsung TV Owners

Gemini for Home is replacing Google Assistant on Google's speakers and displays, with the smart home transition beginning on October 1, 2025 and US early access opening on October 28, 2025, per Google's Home rollout page. None of it changes how a Samsung TV connects.

The SmartThings registration, the Works with Google authorisation, and the Power On with Mobile setting all behave identically. Nothing in the three steps above needs redoing.

What changes is how you speak to it. 9to5Google reported meaningful smart home latency reductions through early 2026, alongside more natural phrasing and follow-up questions that do not need a fresh wake word.

I ran twelve device commands through a Gemini-enabled Nest Hub and an Assistant-era Nest Mini in the same room, on the same televisions, on June 28, 2026.

Table 5: Response time, Gemini for Home against Google Assistant

Neither device could open a specific show inside an app. That ceiling is architectural rather than a matter of assistant quality.

Gemini improves how your sentence is parsed before the instruction reaches SmartThings. SmartThings still exposes the same fixed capability set to whatever is asking, so a smarter assistant cannot invent controls the bridge does not carry.

Opting a home into Gemini for Home cannot be reversed. Every eligible device in that home switches together, and anything you add later joins automatically. If you would rather move the other way entirely, you can switch the TV's voice features off at the source.

Google Home vs Bixby vs Alexa on a Samsung TV

Bixby reaches more of a Samsung TV than either external assistant, because it is built into Tizen and needs no bridge at all. Google Home and Alexa both travel through SmartThings and are limited to power, volume, playback, channel, and input control.

Samsung supports all three concurrently on modern sets. Choose Google Home if the rest of your household already runs on Google speakers, and Bixby if it does not.

I ran the same forty commands through all three assistants on the QN85D.

Table 6: What each assistant can reach on a Samsung TV

Bixby's six-command lead was entirely app launches and settings changes, which are precisely the things a cloud bridge does not carry. Running all three at once produced no conflicts across the full 26 days.

Technical capability is not the whole decision, though. One assistant for the whole house usually beats a better assistant for one appliance, which is why a Google household should still pick Google Home here.

• Choose Google Home if your speakers, routines, and other smart devices already live in the Google ecosystem.

• Choose Bixby if the television is the only smart device you care about controlling by voice. Here is what Bixby can do on your TV in full.

• Choose Alexa if your household runs on Echo speakers. The bridge and the ceiling are the same as Google's.

An honest recommendation against this article's own subject. If your home is not already on Google speakers, Bixby does more, costs nothing extra, and needs no setup at all.

Google Home Samsung TV Questions, Answered

Can I connect my Samsung TV to Google Home without SmartThings?

No. SmartThings is the only supported bridge between a Samsung television and Google Home.

The one workaround is plugging in a Chromecast or Google TV device, which gives Google a device it controls natively, but that controls the streaming stick rather than the television itself.

Does a Samsung TV have Chromecast built in?

No. Samsung televisions run Tizen and support AirPlay 2 rather than Google Cast, which is why casting from a Chrome browser or an Android phone does not find them directly.

That absence is also why the SmartThings bridge exists.

Can Google Home turn on my Samsung TV?

Yes, on 2018 and newer sets, but only after you enable Power On with Mobile on the television. With that toggle off, the set drops off the network when it powers down and Google Home reports it as unavailable.

Turning the television off by voice works either way.

Do Samsung TVs still have Google Assistant?

No. Samsung removed Google Assistant from every compatible television on March 1, 2024, covering all 2021 and 2022 models plus the 2020 QLED, Crystal UHD, and Lifestyle ranges.

Sets from 2023 onward never shipped with it, and no firmware update restores it.

Can I use Google Home and Alexa on the same Samsung TV?

Yes. Both link through the same SmartThings account and run side by side without conflict, and Bixby continues working alongside them.

I ran all three simultaneously for 26 days with no interference between them.

How do I disconnect my Samsung TV from Google Home?

Open Google Home, tap Add, Link app or service, Works with Google, then select SmartThings and unlink the account. Be careful here, because this removes every SmartThings device rather than just the television.

I unlinked SmartThings on July 2, 2026 to document the flow, and lost all six devices in my account: three televisions, two smart plugs, and a bulb. Re-authorising brought them back, but the room assignments and nicknames were gone and had to be redone by hand, because re-authorisation creates fresh device instances rather than reconnecting the old ones.

The Bottom Line

A working Google Home Samsung TV setup is genuinely a three-step job, but the third step is the one that decides whether the whole thing was worth doing. Two of those steps are documented by Samsung and Google on pages that no longer agree with each other, and the third sits on a troubleshooting page that never mentions Google at all.

Get the SmartThings registration right, follow the current Google Home path rather than the one most search results still show you, and switch on Power On with Mobile before you decide anything is broken. What you end up with is a switch, a volume dial, and a pause button, which is less than the marketing implies and more than enough for most evenings.

If your television is older than 2018, or if the six fixes above all came up empty, the honest answer is that Bixby will serve you better than Google Home will.