Stay at home Google seems a lot more focused on life at home, you know the old adage, engineers are just solving their own problems using code. Thanks to some early testers we seem to be getting a sneak peak at Google’s new family-centred feature for Assistant/ Smart Displays, Family Bell.
Similar to reminders, Family Bell is a family-wide reminder system ideal for those routine tasks that may not get done, like taking out the garbage bins. Unlike regular reminders Family Bell reminders will read the text of the reminder from a designated Assistant smart speaker.
The feature is showing up for some users in the Assistant feed with a link to “Try it”. Once activated you get access to a new menu in the Assistant settings that lets you setup/ customise and manage your Family Bell reminders. It’s unclear if everyone in a Google Family account can manage the Bells or if it is restricted to the account that created them.
Setting up a Family Bell is very similar to a normal reminder with the big difference we mentioned before, you can choose an Assistant Smart Device to play the reminder audio through. Unfortunately you can’t send to a speaker group as yet, so you can’t blast every kids room in the house with “Get out of bed now”.
When a bell is played you will see it displayed on your Smart Display, hear the notification and get a popup toast on your linked Android Devices.
We will keep an eye out to see if the feature rolls out to Australian users and if you see the prompt in your Google Feed why not give it a go and send us a screenshot.
