Google Assistant kills off support for third-party note apps

The lettering "Hey Google" on the Google pavilion at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in 2018. These words activate Google Assistant, Google's virtual personal assistant.

Enlarge / The lettering "Hey Google" on the Google pavilion at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in 2018. These words activate Google Assistant, Google's virtual personal assistant. (credit: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance)

The deprioritized Google Assistant is losing yet another feature. This time Google is killing off support for third-party note integration. The popular Android note-taking app AnyList announced the change, saying that "Google is shutting down the Google Assistant Notes & Lists integration for non-Google apps on June 20, 2023." Google's support page has since been updated confirming that, "starting June 20th, Google Assistant notes and lists will no longer work with non-Google list apps."

One of the best Assistant commands lets you dictate notes directly into the voice system, letting you create reminders, shopping lists, or just new, plain-format notes. Exactly where these notes land has been a point of contention over the years. They used to land in Google Keep no matter what, but then in 2017 Google blew up that functionality and forces all shopping notes into "Google Express," Google's Amazon Prime competitor. As someone who often used the shopping list for groceries, having it tied to an online store that I had no intention of ever using was pretty silly. Even if you didn't mind the change, which essentially turned your notes into an ad for Google's shopping site, the note-taking features got a major downgrade, going from the fully featured Google Keep app to Google Express' barely there web app.

In 2019, presumably after forced Google Express integration didn't juice the services numbers, the Google Assistant got another note-taking revamp, this time allowing users to pick whatever note-taking app they wanted from the Assistant settings. Google Keep, Any.do, AnyList, and Bring were all available at launch, and the Assistant would seamlessly dump your notes into your preferred app and even allow you to update them by voice. It was a great system, but now that's going away, too. Google tells 9to5Google that Google Keep will keep working—it seemingly plugged into the same system as third parties—but all those third-party apps are being cut off.

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