You can now schedule your lights to turn on and off with Google Assistant

Assistant has long been able to toggle lights on and off by voice, but until now those actions have been carried out immediately. Now, you can set up what are called ‘Scheduled Actions’ which will allow you to conveniently schedule smart home commands to trigger at a later time. Some examples of this include “Hey Google, turn on the lights in five minutes,” or “Hey Google, turn on the lights at 7 AM.”

Some users on Reddit have found that you can also use the words “sunset” or “sunrise” as triggers instead of specific times and even tell Assistant to turn lights on for a duration of time instead of just turning them on at a specific time. Saying something like “Hey Google, turn the lights on FOR five minutes” also works.

You can schedule commands to fire off on another day of the week up to seven days in advance by using phrases like “Hey Google, turn on my coffee maker at 8 AM tomorrow.” or “Hey Google, run my sprinkler in a week at 5 PM”. Scheduled Actions can be canceled too, but you’ll need to specify a temporal adverb or else you’ll get an error, so make sure you add “tomorrow”, “next week”, or some other time frame at the end of the phrase so that your Assistant knows what to do. So, first, ask Google to cancel a scheduled action using one of the phrases below, then follow up by specifying exactly what you want to be canceled.

“Hey Google, cancel my scheduled Actions”

“Hey Google, remove my <device>s’ schedule.”

Phrases to use if you want to cancel scheduled Actions.

As of writing this, these actions do not work with smart plugs by default, but if you change their device type in the Home app so that they identify as a light or a fan or even a dehumidifier, and then the Assistant will immediately recognize them as eligible for scheduled Actions – weird. It’s worth noting that outside of this new feature, Assistant routines can already schedule lights to turn on and off at specific times and under different circumstances, but scheduled Actions are a welcome addition because they make it easier to perform one-off tasks more casually.