Google made plenty of noise about its new Digital Wellbeing tools when it announced them back at the Google I/O developer conference in May, and it looks very much like the company plans to roll out this suite of apps to its smart assistant and smart speakers.
9to5Google did some digging in the most recent version of the Google app and found Digital Wellbeing is coming to the Google Assistant in the near future. There's a new Digital Wellbeing menu entry and it looks as though you might be able to set limits on the use of tech gadgets – possibly through one such gadget, the Google Home.
None of this is working yet or visible in the app, and Google hasn't said anything about extending the Digital Wellbeing idea to its other products, but it makes sense that features like this would need to work across all the hardware that Google makes.
Step away from the technology
If you've missed the news on Digital Wellbeing, it's a new dashboard in Android 9 Pie that lets you see how often you're unlocking your phone, and which apps you use the most, and how many notifications you're getting peppered with every day.
On top of that you can set limits on the daily use of specific apps, specify certain times when notifications won't appear or make a sound, and activate a new feature called Wind Down, which blocks access to apps and turns the screen gray, so you're less tempted to start bingeing on a Netflix series when you should be going to bed.
It's part of a growing trend of tech companies wanting to help us use the tech they've created responsibly – a similar feature called Screen Time is coming to the iOS 12 update due to launch later this month.
