Google Family Calendar doesn’t quite work with Assistant/Home
Google recently rolled out the family calendar, this is a calendar that you can share with anyone you’ve defined as family and placing something on it places it in everyone’s calendar. Great for scheduling and reminding someone that they can’t schedule something at that time.
I have a job today, it’s on the family calendar because I had to schedule with my wife after work. I asked Google Home what’s on my calendar for today this morning, nothing. I ask what’s on my family calendar, nothing. Kim asked what’s on her calendar, nothing. Nope, it’s there, we both know it.
So yeah, I can see (and Google Home will cycle out,) other calendars. I can get my CES calendars rattled off to me, I can get shared events displayed, family calendar exists just out of reach rendering it useless to Google Assistant.
This is extremely bad as I can make a new appointment via Google Home or Assistant and never be notified that it’s conflicting with an event on the family calendar.
To the right you’ll see my event listed as fighting a dragon. This is not the event’s real name, it’s been photoshopped because duh duh duh… personal info. This event exists in the calendar app, calendar.google.com, and functions normally.
This event can’t be heard, managed, or talked about from Google Assistant, Google Home, pretty useless. Dragons aren’t going to get fought this way. “Oh what, Smaug? That was today? we’re going to have to reschedule.”
As near as I can tell there’s also no way to see or set anything on the calendar via Google Home or Assistant.
This is almost as much an annoyance as trying to set an event for two weeks from today.
It seems like these are things that would have been resolved in alpha testing, not in somewhat finished software.
In the picture on the left I asked what’s on the family calendar and got that there were no matching events. Not that it doesn’t have access to the family calendar, that there were no events.
That response leads me to believe that it has accessed the family calendar and there was nothing on it, there is, dragon fighting. Not going to let Puff’s forces prevail.
So anyway, Family calendar and assistant are not reliable together at the moment, beware.
