There are two things that I use Google Assistant very frequently. They are reminders and timers. It is so easy to start a timer using the Assistant. On my phone, the Assistant starts the timer using the default Clock app. This gives me a visual timer and it is easy to handle it, see the remaining time, etc.
Things aren’t that great on Chrome OS.
On my Pixelbook if I start a timer, I don’t get any visual cue that the timer started. There is no way to see the remaining time as well. When the timer is up, a notification will show up along with the notification sound. If I click “Stop” on that, it sends a “Stop timer” command to the Assistant. Yes, you can see Assistant launching and respond to this command.
Looks like this is going to change.
A recent code commit talks about adding a tick behavior to the Assistant timer.
Add tick behavior to Assistant timer notifications.
New ticking behavior is flag guarded behind ChromeOSAssistantTimerTicks,
disabled by default.This CL also introduced UpdateNotification APIs to the Assistant
notification controller/model.
From the way it looks, we will have a timer running on the notification tray, along with the remaining minutes and seconds. I don’t see any mention of the Android Clock app in the code committed today. So, it is most likely to be a Chrome OS-specific notification.
I’ll share an update when this feature is available for us to test.
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