San Francisco, Nov 24 (IANS): Google Assistant now allows users to schedule lights and other devices to turn on/off at specific times with a new feature.

You can now tell Google Assistant to "turn the lights off in five minutes", or even to switch them on at a specific time, such as "turn on the living room light at 5:45 pm". Similarly, you can ask it to switch a light on for a specific amount of time by saying, "turn on the entrance light for five minutes", reports Android Police.

The Scheduled Action feature appears to have started rolling out with users on Reddit claiming to have spotted it. However, it is not clear if it is available for everyone just yet.

The support page clarifies that Google Assistant can have trouble recognising temporal adverbs and users will have to specify the exact date and time when scheduling a command.

In addition, the feature will also let you cancel scheduled actions by using commands like: "Hey Google, cancel my scheduled actions" or "Hey Google, remove my (device name) schedule". But these cancellation commands don't seem to work at the moment.

Currently, Google and even Amazon allow users to schedule routines; however, both Assistant and Alexa lack the ability to control smart home appliances in advance.