Google has today announced a new update to their Wear OS platform, with a focus on making it easier to access information through Google Assistant and notifications, as well as accessing fitness and health information.
The update to Wear OS brings things like the recent update to Google Fit on your phone over to your wrist, with an update to the Google Fit Wear OS app making it more integrated and easier to access. Now you’ll simply swipe to the left to see how you are tracking with your Heart Points and Move Minute goals, or tap on the workout complication to access a range of workouts to help improve your fitness.
Also improving in the latest Wear OS update is access to Google Assistant. Google says that with the new layout Google Assistant is able to bring you more ‘proactive and personalized’ help.
In the new update, a swipe to the right will show a stream of helpful suggestions from Google Assistant, including tips for the road warrior like flight status or hotel reservations and smart suggestions like weather or restaurants near your destination. For those sticking closer to home, Google Assistant will also show you weather updates and traffic conditions or your schedule for the day and Google says the Assistant will even suggest new features you haven’t used before that it thinks you may find helpful.
Finally, something close to most Wear OS users: Notifications. Google is making it easier to ‘browse, dismiss or take action on your notifications’ with a new stream. As you do now, you simply swipe up from your watch face to see your notifications, but now there will be things like smart replies to reply to important messages without leaving the stream.
Google is also giving you faster access to things like Google Pay and ‘Find my Phone’ with shortcuts accessible from swiping down from your watch face.
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In terms of when you’ll see the update, Google says they will begin rolling out the update to watches running Wear OS 2.0 and higher over the next month. There are a lot of watches running Wear OS 2.0, so that’s a big job, so we can expect to see a staggered update over the next few weeks. No word on which watches will receive it first, so the race is on. Let us know in the comments if you see the update on your wrist.
Why are they dripfeeding Assistant functionality on Wear like it’s a new development, when it should be at parity with Assistant on the phone right from the start? Try “Ok Google, what song is this” and you get a google search result showing a Verge article on how to search for songs. Considering identifying a song is one of the better use cases for Assistant on a watch, I don’t know how they haven’t sorted this out.
Hoping the notification updates include stacked notifications, another phone feature that would be far more useful on a watch.
I am glad that Google is focusing on Wear OS again! Nice improvements to the Swipe actions.
Users don’t change watch faces all the time.