Google Assistant now lets users schedule lights and other devices to turn on and off at specific times with its “scheduled actions” feature, according to Android Police, which cites Google Assistant developer documentation.
Google Assistant has worked with Hue and other smart lights for some time, to turn them on and off and to set alarms, but now you can tell your Assistant exactly when you want to turn on lights and other devices in a smart home.
One caveat: you have to be really specific if you want to schedule the lights (or other devices) to turn on or off a day in the future. Just saying something like, “Hey Google, turn the lights on tomorrow at 8PM,” isn’t enough. You’d need to say, “Hey Google, turn on the lights Tuesday at 8PM.”
However, as Android Police noted, you can specify “sunrise” and “sunset” as times to set your lights to come on (or off) and you won’t need to state the exact time. You also can use Google Assistant to schedule a length of time to keep lights on, such as “turn on lights for 10 minutes.”
The feature is apparently still a work in progress, however; in addition to the “tomorrow” quirk, Reddit users and Android Police note that the function to cancel a scheduled action doesn’t appear to work. But according to Google Assistant smart home documentation, it looks like these features are likely to be working soon.
