Google Assistant Rolls Out New Feature to Find Lost iPhone

Tech giant Google has announced new features coming to Google Assistant on Thursday, and the most essential feature is - finding your lost iPhone.

For quite some time, iPhone users have been able to find their smartphones using the Find My service. To help find your lost iPhone, Siri integration is also on board, so you can just ask the assistant where your iPhone is and it will ping your device with an audible notification which even bypasses Do Not Disturb, even if it is enabled.

The exact same feature is coming to Google Assistant, according to Google.

In a blog post shared by Lilian Rincon, Senior Director of Product Management for Google Assistant, Rincon stated, "You can tell your Nest smart speaker or smart display, "Hey Google, find my phone," for all devices, now including iPhone models. For iPhone devices, once you opt in to receiving notifications and critical alerts from the Google Home app, you'll get a notification and hear a custom ringing sound (even when the phone is on silent or if Do Not Disturb is enabled)."

One massive downside is that a user will be able to ping their phone using Google Assistant, however, it will not show up on a map like Find My. Nevertheless, if someone ends up losing their iPhone within the personal space, it is a great way to find it and reunite with it once again.

An iPhone user can ask Google Assistant to find their phone using any platform, whether it is a speaker, one of the new Chromecast devices, or even an Android tablet. It is important to have the Google Home app installed on one's iPhone and signed in using his/her account for this to work. 

Why did LG give up on its smartphone business? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Later (starting at 22:00), we talk about the new co-op RPG shooter Outriders. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.