Google’s Find My Device service is invaluable when you lose your phone while you’re out and about, but it’s also great if your handset disappears in the vast void that is your couch, bed, or hallway. Just hit up Google Assistant on one of your smart home speakers or displays and ask it to “Find my device.” However, for people who juggle more than two phones at once (like us here at Android Police), this can quickly turn into a frustrating experience, as Google would only help you find the two most recently used phones. That has changed — the Assistant will now give you a selection of up to nine phones at a time.
In the past, the Assistant would only ever ask if you’d like to ring up the two latest devices you’ve used in a binary selection and give up after that. The problem with that is that sometimes, Google doesn’t seem to know which phone you’ve actually had your hands on last, so if you’ve switched to a handset you haven’t used in a while, you couldn’t get the Assistant’s help to find it.
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— Jamie Barron (@gumbald) June 11, 2020
With the latest update, Google or Nest Home speakers ask if they should ring the last device you’ve used first. When you say no, the Assistant will give you a selection of up to five other handsets connected to your account. The list can be expanded by three more when you say no again, but the total of nine handsets seems to be the hard limit, whether you have more devices connected to your account or not. On smart displays and phones, you can even view the list and tap the one you’d like it to call up.
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— Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) June 11, 2020
There are still some issues with this implementation. The list of phones often uses long and irritating codenames, as in Artem’s case above, so it’s unclear what some of those devices are without looking them up (or renaming them under play.google.com/settings). You’ll also have to sit through the whole session of five devices each time — you can’t interrupt the Assistant when it’s reading the right device’s name to you. It’s also a bummer that you can’t just say something like “Find my Pixel 4.” Any specific command gets treated like the generic “Find my phone/device.”
The update should be live for everyone using the US English version of the Assistant, but if you don’t use more than one or two phones regularly, you won’t even notice it’s there. It’s a bummer that the voice command still doesn’t help you find your tablet or Chromebook should you misplace those, but it’s definitely progress.
