According to an easy-to-miss sentence on a Google Assistant Help page first found by 9to5Google, Assistant’s location-based reminders are being axed entirely. On Android, a notification appears at the top of your “Reminders” page through the Chrome browser or Google app stating this fact while offering alternatives.
Important: The option to create reminders for a certain location is going away soon. You can still create reminders at a certain time and set routines for a location.
Google Assistant Help
For example, the company will still allow you to set routines for a specific location, and also to assign reminders to specific family members, even though this feature was also supposed to be going away. There’s still a chance that the latter could disappear soon since Google seems to be cleaning house.
It’s possible that all of these changes are being handled as a means of fixing up shop before the launch of the awesome Google Assistant Memory feature that we’ve written extensively about. Memory will let you save practically anything for later – articles, books, contacts, events, products, screenshots, movies and TV shows – you name it.
In the past, you’ve been able to ask Google Assistant to remember your favorite color, birthday, and other basic information. When you ask it to tell you what the answers to these questions were, the Assistant would then dip into its hidden memory and present you with the answer you gave it prior. ‘Assistant Memory’ as a service seems to be supercharging that cute little feature and turning it into an accessible powerhouse that you can use directly and I have to admit – that’s really cool.
Assistant Memory could be the future of Google Collections and let you save anything for later
It’s always possible that the feature to set reminders to fire off based on a specific location you pass or find yourself in could make a comeback with Assistant Memory, but for now, it is sad to see it sunset. I believe that most people probably didn’t use it much, and Google is trying to find ways to automate it so that users won’t have to do the work themselves. This is a common approach for the tech giant, and it’s well within its wheelhouse as an AI-first company to figure something out that makes this much more user-friendly.
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