Alarms and timers have always been isolated on Google Assistant devices. You have to manually manage those for each device you have in your smart home setup, directly from the device or from the Google Home app. This can get rather cumbersome depending on the number of alarms and timers you have set, as well as the number of devices. In July this year, Google was spotted working on a fix for this, at least for timers. It was developing a Cross Device Timer feature for the At a Glace widget on Pixel smartphones. The feature integrates with Google Home to show timers from all of your Google Assistant-powered smart displays and speakers. Not much else was known about Cross Device Timer back then. But it’s now rolling out to users, and we finally know what it brings. According to a 9to5Google report, Cross Device Timer sits under the “more” section of At a Glance settings. Once you enable this toggle, you will see timers set on compatible Google Assistant devices on the At a Glance widget. The timer appears within seconds of starting on another device, complete with the device’s name. You can control the timers directly from there. You will also get a notification from Google Assistant when the timer goes off. The notification is accompanied by buttons to stop the timer or extend it by a minute. This feature currently only works for timers, though. Google isn’t adding cross-device support for alarms just yet. Hopefully, the company is working on it. Of course, it wouldn’t be nice if an alarm set in one room blasts throughout the rest of the house. But the ability to set or stop an alarm on one device from the other would be a great help.
Google is rolling out Cross Device Timer for Pixel’s At a Glance widget
The Cross Device Timer feature for Pixel’s At a Glance widget started rolling out to users recently. It doesn’t appear to be a wide rollout yet, but everyone should get it within the next couple of weeks or so. You may also see a Google Opinion Rewards survey from the company after you enable this feature for the first time. Google ran this survey after rolling out the food and grocery delivery status to At a Glance earlier this month.
