Google has disabled Assistant reminders for G Suite users

G Suite users must face a new disappointment every few weeks. Once they learned of a useless limitation on their account, they discovered a new one. The final blow is that the Assistant says it doesn’t support reminders for G Suite accounts now … even if it happened a few days ago.

If your Google Assistant is set up to use a G Suite account, be it a free account since Google allowed families and small businesses to own it, or a paid company-issued account, you will notice any questions to the Assistant about reminders will result in the same “unavailable” message. This is even more annoying because Google has decoupled reminders from your search application and is now forcing all add/edit functions to go through the Assistant.

As a G Suite user, you have some workarounds, but there is no way to know if they will work long. You can use Google search to the type or say “remind me of [action] on [date/time],” and it should be processed and added to your reminders … well, as long as the reminders work in the Google interface. Web (they are known to die every few months). You can also revert the Google app to an older version and use the previous native reminder UI that processed all requests without going through the Assistant. And finally, you can add Google Calendar reminders, although the second didn’t cause those reminders to sync and show up in the Google app for me. Your mileage may vary.

Regardless of the workaround, you can’t just ask the Assistant about your reminders, even though Google was happy to add more G Suite User Assistant featured a few months ago. If this reminder limitation is a momentary bug or a “feature,” only time will tell.