Google Calendar will soon let you manually add contact birthdays with notifications on Android

It looks like Google Calendar may soon roll out a new feature that allows you to manually add birthdays with notifications on Android. This was first spotted by a user on Twitter by the name of @AssembleDebug, who showed off an early-look video of the step-by-step process.

The new approach allows you to “Get reminders for the birthdays of people you care about” via a new pop-up test banner at the top of the app which is only appearing for a handful of users at this time. You can type in a person’s name and indicate their birth date via the built-in date selector. The card then slides upward, revealing the notification settings and the calendar that the reminder will reside on. Once submitted, it then appears on your Google Calendar as a smart card with a big, Googley birthday cake vector image!

It’s worth noting that Google Contacts already does birthdays, and they also appear on your Calendar via linked data. In fact, it recently updated to draw even more attention to that special day for each of your relationships via the Highlights feed. So then, why is Google working to add manual additions directly by the user? My only guess is that this new feature will allow birthdays to be added for individuals that may not be in your contact book, such as colleagues or acquaintances.

In the future, I hope this manually added data will intelligently link to that contact if an entry by the same name is detected, but for now, there’s no evidence of this and we have no way of knowing the company’s intentions or why it’s oddly obsessed with birthday features across its ecosystem as of late. Is this perhaps some busy work for a few Google interns or just polish they’ve had on the back burner for a few years? Who knows, but let me know what you think in the comments!