The Google Assistant can finally program your lights

Smart lights are the easiest and most affordable entry into the smart home. In terms of convenience, planning your lights is one of the biggest benefits, especially if you have a defined routine, your hands are tied, or you leave for a few days. This that’s why it was really annoying that Google Assistant can’t do much more than turn your lights on or off when it tells you to. Fortunately, it looks like Google’s finally fixed that.

According to Android Police and Reddit Forums, you can now ask Google Assistant to schedule your lights to turn on and off, both for a specific time and duration. For example, you can ask the Google Assistant to turn off your lights at 11 p.m. or turn them on in ten minutes. You can also ask the Google Assistant to turn the lights on or off for five minutes. Sunrise and sunset can also be specified as triggers.

The capacity comes via the Planned actions feature, which Google added without fanfare at the end of last month. One of the reasons it may have flown under the radar is that it looks like there are still some issues. For example, if a user requests a general time, such as “tomorrow” or “next week” without specifying the exact hour, the Google Assistant will return an error. Some users also pointed out that while Google says you can undo these actions, it doesn’t look like you can right now. Plus, while Google says you can plan up to seven days in advance, Android police have found they can’t beyond the next day.

It’s not that these scheduling options are completely new to smart lights. They have been around for a long time. It’s more than you have to plan routines to get voice assistants to do it. With Amazon Alexa, for example, this requires you to create an app to preset these routines and then you have to remember to schedule a routine and not necessarily the lights themselves. It’s not impossible, just not very intuitive. (And while I was testing smart lighting planning for this blog, there are times when Alexa just doesn’t get the look “at one point or another.”) Those new planning voice commands with Google Assistant appear more natural.

I have tried some of the time-based planning options for myself and was pleasantly surprised at how effective they are. I was particularly impressed with the ability to turn the lights on / off for a specific amount of time. This is useful for areas like hallways, where you might want some light to tie your shoes on, but prefer to issue one voice command instead of two.

Programming smart homes is a huge pain, so anything that makes interacting with your devices more intuitive is a good thing. And since it reduces my need to plan or modify routines? It’s an A + in my book.