Google is expanding its “Snapshot” feature into Assistant, adding new reminders and more proactive suggestions for new activities you might want to try.
The first version of Snapshot showed information such as your daily commute time, upcoming schedule, reminders, upcoming flights, recent online orders, and stock market updates. Google adds to that list additional reminders for things like upcoming birthdays and holidays.
The updated Snapshot view will also expand its recommendations – where the app would previously suggest YouTube videos or Spotify songs, the updated version will use your existing user data to offer new recipe ideas, podcasts or restaurants to order from. These suggestions will also be updated throughout the day, as will the rest of the Snapshot mode (so you will not receive any suggestions for recipes for breakfast).
To make Snapshot more useful, Google adds a new way to access it: now you can retrieve the view at any time in the Assistant app by saying “Hey Google, show me my day,” next to pressing on the Snapshot button within the app. (The voice management feature is only available to customers with English as the default language, but will roll out for more languages in the future.)
Finally, Google adds birthday reminders to the Assistant notification options. If it’s one of your contacts’ birthdays, Assistant can send you an alert, taking you straight to an action card where you can easily call, send, or sing “a personalized birthday song.”
The new features of Google Assistant are now available in the Assistant app on iOS and Android.
