What you need to know
- Google has announced that it will integrate Tasks into Assistant and Calendar.
- Tasks will be used to set reminders, replacing Assistant and Calendar Reminders.
- The transition will take place over the "coming months."
Google has announced that it's making a big change to one of our favorite apps. In an effort to seemingly consolidate more of its apps and services, Google Tasks will soon be the go-to app for all your to-do needs.
The change comes after leaks that Google was planning to get rid of Assistant Reminders in favor of Tasks. On Tuesday, the company revealed that it would merge Assistant and Calendar reminders into Google Tasks in an effort to simplify its task management solutions.
As a result of this change, new reminders will be added to Tasks when creating them through Google Assistant, that way, you can easily access them from just about anywhere, allowing reminders and tasks to all be kept in a single place across services. Google also highlights the "Add to tasks" button in Gmail and Chat as an example of how Tasks can be created and viewed from various places.
Google says the transition will take place "in the coming months," when users will receive a prompt to try out the new experience. As part of the transition, Goals and Reminders are set to be removed from Google Calendar.
Google Tasks is one of our favorite apps, mainly because it's easy to use and already integrates well with other apps across Workspace. It pretty much does what it needs to do in the most straightforward way (we finally go starred tasks!), and it's already well-integrated within Google's apps. Being further integrated with other services like Google Assistant will only make a great app even better, and we can't wait for the new experience to roll out.
In the meantime, this isn't the only recent example of Google consolidating its apps. The company recently began merging Google Meet and Google Duo for a single video chat experience that spans both personal and work. The company is also set to kill Hangouts in the coming months as it focuses its Workspace messaging efforts on Chat.
With this new Google Tasks/Assistant Reminders union, all we need now is for Google to finish the job by figuring out what to do with Keep, another app we love that essentially does the same thing.
