Google Assistant has probably been able to make its case as your default digital assistant with all the new features and integrations with other devices that it has brought over the past couple of years. But there’s always room for improvement of course, particularly when it comes to setting up Assistant Routines and navigating through the sometimes cluttered settings. It looks like Google is testing out some new features that can help you with both of these things as you may soon get sunrise/sunset triggers and a search bar in the settings.
9 to 5 Google shares that we might soon see a new option when setting up your Assistant Routines. Previously, you could only see “Voice command” when you’re creating a custom phrase and “Time”. But now joining them is a “Sunrise/sunset” trigger that will let your routine be activated when there is sunlight or lack of sunlight. This is especially useful for when you’re setting up automatic routines for smart lighting in your house.
After you’ve chosen either sunrise or sunset, you can then select a location for your routine. You can also choose whether it will be triggered at the specific event or an interval before or after it. You can also then choose the days when it will repeat and what device it will trigger. There’s an option to receive notifications too when the Routine has been triggered. This test seems to be for only a small subset but let’s hope it rolls out to more users.
Meanwhile, we can all probably agree that the settings in Google Assistant can be such a maze and a mess. With so many features in there, it can get pretty cluttered and difficult to find what exactly you’re looking for. Android Police shares that we may soon get a search bar in the Settings page to help us access feature settings more easily. After all, Google’s expertise is search so having that built into something as functional as the settings is logical.
You can just type in your keyword or keywords and all related and matching search results in both the main menu and submenu will show up. Supposedly. But since this is still in its early stage, it looks like some items in the submenu are not showing up. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix this problem soon.