As part of its Cloud Next conference, Google today announced a small but welcome new Google Assistant feature that allows Google’s virtual assistant to finally help you manage your work calendar in G Suite.
Traditionally, as Google rightly notes, the Assistant has mostly been about helping you keep track of your personal life. Now, however, you’ll also be able to sign in with your G Suite account and ask the Assistant for information about your work day. This integration should work across all Google Assistant surfaces, including the car and Assistant displays like the Google Home Hub.
Right now, this feature mostly focuses on asking for calendar events, though. As far as we can tell, you won’t be able to create an event through the Assistant just yet. Google does note, though, that you can use this feature to, for example, ask about an upcoming event and then send an email to the other attendees.
What’s interesting here is that so far, Google has never positioned the Assistant as a productivity tool in the workplace. Names like “Google Home” and “Home Hub” pretty much make that clear. Sometimes, though, work and home life overlap and at its core, the same technology that allows you to turn on your kitchen lights with your voice could also be used to pull interesting data out of a spreadsheet.
It’ll be interesting to see if Google plans to expand on this theme in the future or if this is a one-off integration.
