Google Home’s biggest flaw fixed: Support for reminders finally arrives

Google is finally fixing Google Home's biggest flaw by adding support for reminders to the voice appliance. An official post on the Google Home help forum says that the feature is rolling out today. Android Police first spotted the news, and some users in the comments section say the feature is already working on their Google Homes.

A Google support page details how reminders on Google Home will work. You'll be able to "set, ask about, and delete reminders on Google Home," and notifications for these reminders will show up on Google Home and your phone when the time comes. Location reminders are not yet supported but are "coming soon."

The voice commands work the way you would expect, but this is the first Google Home feature that enables notification support—a tricky task for a device without a screen. According to the support doc, when it's reminder time, Google Home will say, "I have a reminder for [name]" and will turn on its lights. From there, a light will stay lit for 10 minutes, kind of as a "missed notification" alert. When you get the reminder prompt, you can ask, "OK Google, what's up?" or just ask it for your reminders. You'll also get the usual phone notification.

Reminders came to Google's voice-command system in 2013, back when it was only a smartphone app. When Google released Google Home in 2016—a platform dedicated solely to Google's voice-command system—it was a shock that it didn't support many commands that users had grown accustomed to over the years. Besides reminders, Google Home lacked support for sending text messages, taking notes, making phone calls, and creating calendar events. Google released a dedicated voice appliance that was much less capable then the voice system it had been shipping on phones for years. To make matters worse, for most of its life Google Home would take priority for the "OK Google" hotword, so if you said, "OK Google" and issued a phone-specific command, Google Home would pick up the command, say "I can't do that," and shut off.

Frequent users of voice commands were better off unplugging Google Home so that their much more capable phones would work with "OK Google" again. Google eventually recognized this problem and started routing "OK Google" requests away from Google Home and toward your phone if Google Home didn't support the command.

Now, almost a full year after release, Google Home is getting closer to something you could call a "1.0" feature set, which can mostly handle the same commands as the Google smartphone. User authentication came to Google Home with multiuser support in April, which could tell users apart and gave Google a path to allow Google Home to access personal data. In May, Google added the ability to create calendar appointments. In August, it got support for phone calls.

Google Home seems like a much more promising product now. Next up for the platform is third-party Google Homes and the launch of the Google Home Mini at Google's 10/4 event.