Johannesburg - In the past couple of months, Google Assistant has rolled out some major features for its Assistant-enabled smart displays and speakers. Now, Google Assistant lets users schedule lights and other devices to turn on and off at specific times with its “scheduled actions” feature.
With scheduled actions, users can ask Google Assistant to turn on a lamp with a Philips Hue light bulb at a specific time or ask the action to be performed at a certain period of time. On top of that users can set an action to only occur for a certain amount of time. For example, users can say “Hey Google, turn on the lights for five minutes” or “Hey Google, turn on the lights at 7am.”
“If a user specifies a temporal adverb, for example, tomorrow or next week without providing an exact time, Google returns an error message,” the post reads.
There are some limitations that come with the new feature that would require users to be more specific on scheduling smart home devices specifically on the date and time when a task or smart device needs to be turned on. For example, if a user wants to turn on the coffee maker on Tuesday at 8am, then you will have to mention the specific day and time in the commend.
Another limitation is that the feature is limited to specifically smart home devices, users can not schedule playing a song or using routines. According to Google, the feature works both on Assistant speakers/displays and smartphones.
The company also added on its support page that users can cancel scheduled actions as a group or on a per-device basis by returning a list of the user’s scheduled Actions and prompts them to specify the one they want to be cancelled.
IOL TECH