Google Assistant Routines Getting Home Screen Shortcuts

Routines through Google Assistant are without a doubt one of the more powerful tools you can utilize to help automate parts of your life. Whether you are leaving your house, hitting that commute, starting up your work-from-home day, or arriving back home after a long day, asking Google to fire up a related Routine gives you more time to focus on dominating life.

Since not all of us like to shout “Hey Google!” or try and find the Assistant on our phones only to then talk to it, it makes sense that Google might introduce home screen shortcuts that give you one-tap access to your most used Routines. Some users are now seeing those arrive.

Over on reddit, at least one user has been prompted with an option to “Add routines to your Home screen” to “Run your favorite routines with a single tap.” As you can see from the screenshot below, he was able to do just that, add a shortcut to turn off lights or something similar in a Routine.

It doesn’t look like this is a wide rollout, as few (or zero) others in that thread have been blessed with the functionality. I don’t have either.

Google hasn’t announced this yet, so it could be the early days of a slow, server-side switch. Anyone see this yet?