Top 5 things you didn’t know you could do with Google Assistant on smartphone

Google Assistant is one of the most useful features in your smartphone but are you using it for your daily needs? Here are some of the features that you can use daily to make your life simpler.

Pedestrians take photographs in front of a Google Inc., office building at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, U.S. (Bloomberg)

Technology has grown a lot around us over the years and now most of our work depends on gadgets such as laptops, smartphones, smartwatches which often sport voice assistants. Google Assistant is one such voice assistant service which you can use on your smartphone without buying an expensive smart speaker. Wondering how?

Here's how you can turn on Google Assistant on your phone:

-Open your device and touch and hold the Home Button or say "Ok Google" or "Hey Google".

-Click on the explore icon in the bottom right.

-Now, tap on your profile picture or initials on top right.

-Go to Assistance option under Settings.

-In the Assistant devices option, choose your phone.

-Turn on Google Assistant by clicking on Get Started.

Isn't that interesting? But we will dig in further in this article and today, we will tell you about 5 things that you may not be aware of that you could do with Google Assistant on your smartphone.

Conversion made simple

Forget doing lengthy calculations, resort to calculators or go to any search engine on your smartphone to make any kind of conversion. All you need to do is to start Google Assistant on your smartphone and ask for the search. For example, you can start the feature on your smartphone and ask, "How many kilometers is 20,000 miles?" or, "How many rupees is 650 dollars?"

The conversion value shows up on your screen as well as is said aloud on your phone.

You can also get to know the current time in different countries just within seconds among a plethora of features.

Translate sentences to your language

We often want to flaunt our knowledge of knowing languages before others. To do so we type a sentence in the language that we know and look for its translation in the language which we want to speak out to. Now, with Google Assistant on your smartphone, you can speak a complete sentence and ask it to translate it in the language you want. For example, say, "How are you in French?" The translation will appear on your screen as well as you can hear the way it is pronounced with the help of your phone speaker.

Get traffic update

You can get information on how to reach a particular place, and how much time it may take for you to reach the place with the Google voice assistance on your smartphone. For example, ask, "Time to reach India Gate?" or any other place you wish to travel. You will hear the voice directing you to take a particular route with minimum traffic as well as ETA.

Read news

Want to stay updated with the happenings around the world? You can do that with Google Assistant on your smartphone. The feature reads out news related to the issues and topics of your interest from the sources of your choice. What is more thrilling is that in this feature there will be actual people reading the news for you and not any speech-to-text conversion.

All you need to do is to ask the Google Assistant to "Play the news". The feature will start reading out news stories from your preferred news sources. You can stop, pause and play the news as per your ease.

Prepare a shopping list and set reminders

In the fast-paced life, we tend to forget too many things including paying our bills or spending some quality time with your family. You ask Google Assistant on your smartphone to remind you to spend some special moments with your family once you reach home and set your home location. Once you are home, the feature will remind you of what you have asked. To set your location, you need to go to the Services option, click on reminders and set the time and add the location.

Apart from this, you can also prepare a shopping list by just saying, "Add shampoo to my shopping list."

It will either save the item to the shopping list in the Google Keep app or in the Google Home app. You can see your shopping list quickly by saying, "What's on my shopping list?"

So without any further ado, try using these features of Google Assistant on your smartphone and make life easier.