Google Assistant’s 3rd-party Notes & Lists integration is shutting down

Abner Li | May 31 2023 - 11:25 am PT

Last June, Google announced it was removing third-party Assistant voice apps and Nest Hub games in a year’s time. With that set to occur on June 20, another casualty of that deprecation is the shutdown of third-party Google Assistant Notes & Lists integration.

In Google Assistant settings, you’ve long had the ability to set a Notes & Lists provider for voice commands that let you create or edit a list/note on speakers and Smart Displays. The options are Google Keep, Any.do, AnyList, and Bring Shopping Lists.

That integration is now going away. The developers of AnyList announced today that “Google is shutting down the Google Assistant Notes & Lists integration for non-Google apps on June 20, 2023.”

Specifically, “it will no longer be possible to use Google Assistant to add items to AnyList.”

The Notes & Lists integration is built on the same Conversational Actions/“Actions on Google” platform that’s set to go away next month.

Conversational Actions were the first way for third-party developers to integrate with Google Assistant. However, third-party voice experiences, which include apps and games with visual interactions on Smart Displays or speakers, are no longer a company priority.

Rather, Google is now focusing on just having Android developers add voice command capabilities to their existing apps. This extends to phones, tablets, Wear OS, Google/Android TV, and Android Auto/Automotive. The developers allude to this as well: “We are continuing to communicate with Google and hope to be able to support Google Assistant on Android devices again in the future, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time.”

The old approach of making an entirely independent voice experience was harder and part of the early days of smart assistant experimentation.

We’ve asked the company whether Google Keep will be impacted by the June 20 deadline or if the upcoming Google Tasks integration, which is not yet widely rolled out, is the only service you can use with Assistant moving forward.

Update: The company tells us that Google Keep will not be impacted by this change.