Scheduling smart home Actions is now a thing but it's got some issues
Google has added the ability to scheduled smart home actions within its smart home ecosystem, using the Assistant.
As first revealed over on the Google Developers site…
“The Scheduled Actions feature allows users to conveniently schedule a smart home command to trigger at a later time. As a developer, you do not need to make any code changes or resubmit your smart home Action in order to enable scheduling.”
That message to devs that they don’t need to do anything indicates that the new feature is already live… we’ve checked and it is.
The post says you can ask things along these lines:
Users can schedule the command to be triggered by specifying a time or duration. For example:
- “Hey Google, turn on the lights in five minutes.”
- “Hey Google, turn on the lights at 7 AM.”
Commands can be scheduled for the current day or another day within the next seven day period. For example, users can say:
- “Hey Google, turn on my coffee maker at 8 AM tomorrow.”
- “Hey Google, run my sprinkler in a week at 5 PM.”
If the user specifies a temporal adverb (for example, “tomorrow” or “next week”) without providing an exact time, Google returns an error.
To cancel a scheduled Action, the user can say:
- “Hey Google, cancel my Scheduled Actions”
- “Hey Google, remove my
s’ schedule.”
However, it’s not without its teething problems. While we’ve had no problems saying things like:
“Hey Google, turn the big office light on in 9 minutes” or “Hey Google, turn the kitchen lights on at 6.30am tomorrow,” we’ve run into problems trying to get smart plugs or smart switches involved.
We’re also getting nowhere with regards to cancelling Scheduled Actions or viewing them on a Google Smart Display.
We’ve also thrown multiple requests at our Google Home smart speaker– such as having the same light come on a few times over a time period and had it not perform all the actions.
A few people on reddit also seem to be having problems with the new feature but, given that it’s not really been officially released yet (bar a mention on the Development site) we’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt on this one.
