Google Assistant

While Google has banked on Smart Displays in recent years, there aren’t quite as many available as we would have hoped. The latest though is the cutesy Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock, which is set to go on sale in Europe for just €50.

The Google Assistant is helpful, it’s useful, and it certainly doesn’t “do nothing” in the wider sense. However, a brand-new “Do Nothing Mode” has arrived on the Google Assistant and all associated devices in India.

Assistant is one of Google’s most important products as voice cements itself as a key way to interact with technology. The personal assistant spans across all of the company’s form factors and plays an outsized role in smart homes. As the new year gets under way, let’s recap all the major features that Google Assistant and Google Home picked up in 2020.

2020 comes to a close in just a few days, ending a year unlike any other. 2021 will be a fresh start in more ways than one, and to ring in the new year, Google Assistant has a song to sing.

Over the past week, a small subset of users have not been able to access Google Assistant on any of their devices. This Assistant glitch appears to be occurring at the Google Account level, with Smart Displays and speakers being the most severely impacted devices.

Google is rolling out a big redesign of how you create and edit Assistant Routines, while at the same time adding the ability for these macros to be automatically invoked at sunrise or sunset.

Assistant Routines have recently seen a flurry of developments from Android homescreen shortcuts to a new editing UI, and Google is now rolling out sunset/sunrise triggers for some users.

Back in August, Google redesigned preferences for Assistant to just be one long alphabetical list. The Google Assistant settings page on Android now features a very convenient search field as tweaks to the Routines interface are being tested.

In mid-November, Google appeared to settle on a compact design for Google Assistant where the activation panel is half as tall and answers don’t take up the entire screen. Google is now widely testing an Assistant design that brings the light bar to all Android phones.

Apple Music hit the scene a few years back, and in the time since, has become a huge competitor in the streaming market. Now, Google Assistant speakers are adding full support for Apple Music.

Routines make it easy to accomplish a bunch of actions with just a single keyword on Google Assistant devices. Now, though, Google is making these even more accessible by allowing Android users to put Google Assistant routines on their homescreens.

Assistant has primarily been tied to your main email account since it launched. However, most people use and have several accounts signed in on their phones. Google Assistant now better reflects that reality with multi-account information access.

Besides voice commands, the key aspect of Google Assistant headphones is having incoming notifications read aloud. Google has now brought this Assistant feature to all wired headphones, regardless of whether they’ve been optimized by the manufacturer.

The new Assistant consists of a transparent, compact UI and faster responses thanks to on-device processing. A strange bug this evening is responsible for the new Google Assistant disappearing from some Pixel 4, 4a, 4a 5G, and 5 phones.

Google Assistant is a powerful tool, but it’s only ever been available on the wrist via the company’s own Wear OS. Now, Google Assistant has arrived on Fitbit, and somewhat annoyingly, it works incredibly well.

Smart speakers and voice assistants are perhaps most useful for controlling your smart home, but in that case, it’s all about instant actions. Now, Google Assistant is adding the ability to schedule commands, certainly a handy trick!

Fitbit yesterday started rolling out Google Assistant to the Versa 3 and Sense. As part of that, users can now link their Fitbit accounts to Google Assistant for basic sleep and wellness data.

Samsung has announced that the Google Assistant is now available on Samsung’s 2020 lineup of smart TVs in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy, and is set to come to a further 12 countries by the end of the year.