Google Assistant Can Now Schedule Your Smart Lights and Other Gadgets

Google Assistant is rolling out a Scheduled Actions feature that will let users schedule a smart home command to trigger at a later time. For example, you can say, “Hey Google, turn on the lights in five minutes” to control your smart lights. You can reportedly also specify a duration for the action, such as "turn on the light for five minutes." As per Google, commands can be scheduled for any day within a seven-day period. The scheduled commands will also work with other smart home gadgets.

While Google Assistant already has the ability to turn lights on and off, users will now be able to schedule actions for a variety of smart home gadgets. For example, you can say, “Hey Google, turn on my coffee maker at 8 AM tomorrow”. You can also use sunset and sunrise as triggers for the command. For example, you can say, “Hey Google, switch lamp on 20 minutes before sunrise”.

The Scheduled Action feature appears to have started rolling out with users on Reddit claiming to have spotted it. However, it is not clear if it is available for everyone just yet.

Users will also be able to cancel a scheduled action, as noted by Google's support page. Google returns a list of the user's scheduled actions and prompts the user to specify the ones they want to cancel. However, early users have reported that the cancelling process is not very smooth.

The support page clarifies that Google Assistant can have trouble recognising temporal adverbs (tomorrow or next week, for example) and users will have to specify the exact date and time when scheduling a command. If a user doesn't, Google Assistant will return an error.

A report by 9to5Google noted that the Scheduled Actions feature is only limited to smart home commands and routines and won't work to schedule actions such as playing music.

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