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Google plans to replace Assistant Reminders in Calendar with Tasks. The company has been working on it behind the scenes since at least June this year. More details about this upcoming migration have now emerged thanks to 9to5Google decompiling the latest version of the Google Calendar app.
According to the publication, version 2022.26.x of Google’s calendar app contains many strings related to the Reminders-to-Tasks migration. For starters, this switch may happen “soon”. Google will show a card notifying users that their “reminders will be upgraded to tasks,” before the change takes place. A “turn my reminders into tasks now” button will let users immediately enforce the migration.
Google explains that replacing Assistant Reminders with Tasks will “give you greater flexibility” with productivity thanks to the latter’s deeper integration with Workspace. It lets you organize and manage your to-dos anywhere in Workspace.
Google Calendar will lose location-based reminders
Unfortunately, you will lose location-based reminders with this switch. That’s because Google Tasks does not support the feature. If a reminder that you’ve added through Assistant Reminders already has a location, it will show up in the task’s description. But it will not trigger a location-based notification. Many people may not like this change but Google is getting rid of this feature from Assistant Reminders as well. So you would have anyways lost the ability at some point regardless of this switch.
The upcoming change to how reminders work in Google Calendar will not involve Keep integration. You probably already know that Keep is another Google service that lets you create reminders, along with Tasks and Assistant. But, while all your reminders are available in Keep, those created in Keep “won’t be turned into tasks”. Google will warn users of this as the migration happens.
This was expected because Tasks does not support images and is not suited for long reminders either. Keep has all those abilities. Perhaps in Keep, you first create a not with all the necessary information and images, if required, before adding a due date and time. Time will tell if this change will affect its to-do capabilities.
As for Calendar switch to Tasks for reminders, Google seems to be looking to streamline the Workspace experience. The company has been laying the groundwork for this migration for over a month now. The latest development suggests it has made notable progress. We will let you know when the switch starts to roll out publicly.