PSA: Assistant ‘stop/turn off’ command deletes all Google Clock alarms on Android

In a rather egregious oversight, one Google Assistant command can delete all the alarms in Google Clock for Android. 

As highlighted by Artem Russakovskii, telling Google Assistant to “stop/turn off alarms” — and other similar phrasing — will delete all the alarms in Google Clock. Assistant returns a “No problem, they’re all canceled” response. (This is different from the “stop/snooze” Quick Phrase.)

There are reports of this behavior dating back to December 2016, or shortly after Google Assistant’s launch on Pixel/Android.

If the Clock app is open to the first tab as you issue this command, you’ll see the deletion in real-time. This includes any current/active, including your Bedtime wake-up time, and those that have been toggled off/grayed out.

If you say “turn off/stop alarm” (instead of “alarms“), Google Assistant will ask which one you’re referring to. However, the behavior is to delete the alarm instead of switching the toggle off, while it’s easy to mix up “alarm” versus “alarms” in the moment.

You’d expect that command to just silence the current alarm or — at worst — turn off any that are active, but Google Assistant goes beyond that in deleting the entire list without any additional confirmation. This can be highly disruptive for those that have dozens arranged in a precise schedule. On the flip side, it’s a quick way to clear the list.

Hopefully, this is addressable via server-side change to Assistant, with Gemini’s Assistant integration also impacted. This should not be the behavior by any stretch of the imagination, especially for alarms that you may not have even set with Assistant.