Hallelujah! Google Assistant finally has access to your G Suite calendar

Google yesterday announced Calendar support via Google Assistant for G Suite customers at its Google Next event. This means employees and students using G Suite accounts will finally be able to edit, update, and check their Calendar using Assistant. It’s about damn time.

G Suite users have been forced to live with a crippled Assistant for years now, while regular Google account holders have existed in a paradise wherein phrases like “Hey Google, access my Calendar” would solicit a response other than:

But those of us using G Suite have glowered at our Google Minis and Assistant Apps for years awaiting the convenience of one of the few truly useful features of voice assistants. We’re sure Google had a perfectly good reason for Assistant’s absence in the workplace, but for now we’re just happy it’s finally here – unless of course your G Suite administrator hasn’t enabled it.

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If that’s the case, rectifying the situation is pretty simple but you’ll need administrator access to your organizations Google Admin console. Once you have that, simply navigate to Google’s step-by-step instructions on controlling which users have access to the Assistant.

Keep in mind that Assistant integration with G Suite is currently in beta, and only seems to work with the G Suite Calendar at the moment. Google’s so far kept plans for further integration under wraps. The company did, however, announce several other quality of life upgrades for G Suite. These include:

• G Suite integration with Google Assistant (beta)
• G Suite Add-ons (beta coming soon)
• Drive metadata (beta)
• Hangouts Meet updates: automatic live captions (generally available), public live streaming (coming soon) and increased meeting participants (coming soon)
• Connected sheets (beta coming soon)
• Hangouts Chat into Gmail (beta)
• Office editing in Docs, Slides and Sheets (generally available)
• Visitor sharing in Drive (beta)
• Currents (beta)
• Security collaboration and automation (beta)

For more information, and the full list of G Suite updates check out Google’s official Blog post here.

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