Google Assistant Routines might just be the easiest way to control your smart home, and now you’ll be getting shortcuts for them on your Android smartphone home screen.
Google now appears to be rolling out the ability to add shortcuts for these Assistant routines to some Android users. Since there’s no official announcement from Google on this though, it’s not clear how widespread it is.
That being said it doesn’t look like many users have access to these shortcuts at the moment. So it’s more likely that Google is pushing the feature out to a smaller number of users first.
Google Assistant routines shortcuts have icons that match the app
To make things as simple as they possibly could be, Google is matching some things up here. Specifically the icon for the routines.
Inside of the Google Home app, routines have their own little icon associated with them. Shortcuts created for the home screen will have the same icon alongside the Google “G.” They’ll also be labeled with some text to help identify the name of the routine shortcut you just created.
This should end up leaving no room for doubt in what routine the shortcut will open access to when you tap it. Or that the routine is for a shortcut at all since the icons match up. And if you’ve been using Google Assistant routines regularly enough, you probably know what the routine icon looks like inside of the Google Home app.
Nevertheless it doesn’t hurt to have these shortcuts be as obvious as possible.
Users will be alerted to the new feature capability
In addition to enabling this feature for some users, Google is also alerting those users that the new feature is available.
It seems that after the feature update is pushed out, the next time that you try to edit a routine you’ll get a popup that tells you shortcuts for them are now available. As with any of Google’s popup tips, users can tap a tiny response that says Got It! and the alert disappears.
Or they can tap on a larger section of that popup to be taken to where users can interact with the feature. Or they can dismiss the popup altogether.
The nice thing is that Google seems to be focusing on letting users know this feature exists. So if you have smart home products set up in your own home, expect to be alerted to the capability to create home screen shortcuts for them sometime in the near future.