Google Assistant may soon start reminding you to turn off or reschedule your daily alarm if the next day is a holiday. The company had announced this feature as part of the March Feature Drop earlier this year. At that time, Google hadn’t revealed how it will work. It appears its digital assistant will be behind the scenes.
Ahead of Canada Day today, Reddit user u/als26 received a notification from Google Assistant reminding them to turn off their alarm (via 9to5Google). “Tomorrow is Canada Day,” the notification is titled. “Tap to change your 9:30 alarm,” the follow-up text reads. The Redditor says 9:30 am is their usual alarm time for work.
Tapping the notification takes you to the Alarm page. From here, Google Assistant will leave you alone. You will have to manually turn off the alarm or reschedule it. As the Redditor notes, it would have been better if you could temporarily disable the alarm for a day. But any assistive reminder to disable the alarm is welcome, rather than you missing it out and an unexpected alarm ruining your morning.
This Google Assistant alarm reminder may roll out to all Android devices
Interestingly, Google’s original announcement suggested this feature would be part of Pixel’s At a Glance widget. The reminder would show up alongside existing Clock app integrations for Bedtime and Timer & stopwatch. The homescreen widget never got a settings toggle for it and, by the looks of it, the feature will be independent of it. Perhaps it will be available to all Android devices through Google Assistant and will not be limited to the Pixel lineup.
Google could do even better if it integrated this Assistant feature into the Clock app. That may pave way for smarter reminders, including the possibility of temporarily disabling the alarm for a day or rescheduling it. Maybe the company has plans for it, we shall see. For the time being, look forward to receiving one such reminder from Google Assistant if you’ve set your alarm to repeat every day.
Meanwhile, in related news, Google Assistant is losing the ability to set location-based reminders. Once this change rolls out to your device, you will no longer be able to specify a location for your reminder. This comes as a surprise, but Google knows what it’s doing. The company advises you to set routines for locations instead. You can still create reminders for a specific time through Google Assistant, though.
2022-07-01 15:04:22