Google's digital well-being could come home

This fall, Google will bring to its Android operating system the new suite of Digital Wellbeing settings, designed to limit the dependence on smartphones.

This follows a company-wide effort to help customers control how they use Google's services and devices – and now, it looks like Digital Wellbeing will also arrive at the lineup Smart Speaker Assistant and Home.

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The materials discovered by 9to5Google, and buried in the latest version of the Home app for Android, indicate a new feature called Downtime. Although the feature does not work yet, its appearance (hidden from view of the usual users, for now) gives a good idea of ​​what Google has planned.

Specifically, the "Family Tools" area of ​​the Home Settings page has been changed to "Digital Wellness". Under this heading, there are two features called Filters and Timeouts.

Since the new Digital Wellbeing feature should replace Family Tools, we believe that Google will use this feature to help children use home appliances. It can be seen that digital welfare is used to limit the wizard's launch of games and play music – in the evening, for example, when parents want their children to stop interacting with the technology before they go to school. sleep.

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This could also be a convenient way to prevent the assistant from playing loud music when the family wants to settle for the evening. We can see a situation where the assistant politely refuses a child's request to play music on a Sunday at 9 pm, but remains receptive and will answer other questions, such as a request for tomorrow's weather forecast.

Since the assistant can identify users by their voice, the system can deny children's requests while responding to their parents at certain times of the day.

Google, Apple and Facebook have all become more interested in how customers use their products and services this year. Apple will launch Screen Time, a system similar to Digital Wellbeing, with iOS 12 later this month to help iPhone users find out how much time they spend on their device and use certain apps. Screen Time also gives options to limit children's access to apps each day.

Meanwhile, Facebook has introduced a feature on Instagram to display when you scroll through messages you have already seen, in order to prevent users from wasting time watching old content. And, of course, Google has digital wellness, which will be available on Android 9 Pie in October, and has recently launched tools to educate YouTube users about time spent on the site.