Google kills its products at an alarming rate. We probably don’t need to worry about it killing Pixel Phonesbut it was no problem closing Stadia after investing millions in it and even recently getting rid of Google Podcasts, which we would have long considered a lock, given the popularity of podcasts. At this point, I’ve learned not to get too attached to anything the company creates, because who knows if/when it will be moved to Google’s infamous graveyard.

Yet there are some things you think are so safe, so resilient, that there’s no way Google is going to kill them. One of them was a simple Google Assistant voice control that allowed you to add text entries in list apps. Google has taken care of this through a system called Notes & Lists.

The way it worked is that third-party apps would integrate the Notes & Lists API so users could say things to Assistant like, “Hey Google, add _____ to my _____ list.” » Intelligently, Assistant would know which list you were referring to in which app, then add that text. Most commonly this would be used to add an item to a shopping list, like the classic “Hey Google, add eggs to my shopping list.”

Unfortunately, in 2023, Google inexplicably disabled Notes and Lists, as well as nearly two dozen other Assistant features. This meant that all third-party apps could no longer support using Assistant voice commands to manipulate lists and notes.

It’s been over a year and I’m still angry about it.

I used to use this command with an application called Any listwhich, in my opinion, is the best way to organize your shopping. For groceries in particular, I have yet to find an app that makes things as simple and intuitive as AnyList. And its main features are free, which is great.

Before, I could be working in the kitchen, tending to a bubbling pan or my flour-covered hands, and just say, “Hey Google, add eggs to my shopping list,” and the assistant would add eggs to my shopping list in AnyList. . This was incredibly convenient because I could add things as soon as I thought of them instead of hoping I’d remember them the next time I had my phone in my (hopefully clean) hands.

Simultaneously, AnyList moved this new “eggs” entry to the dairy section of my grocery list, keeping everything nice and organized so that when I got to the grocery store, all my dairy products were together. This saved me from having to go through the store multiple times to find my items or having to stand there going through my list to see if I needed to pick up anything else before moving on to the next aisle.

However, with the Notes and Lists functions removed, I can’t verbalize what I want to add to AnyList. I can’t even move on to another grocery appbecause removing Notes & Lists affects all third-party apps in this category, including Bring!, Todoist, Out Of Milk, etc. Of course, there is one app that still works: Google Keep. Having no options left, I tried switching to Keep.

Keep is terrible for shopping lists: period. It’s too basic. Yes, I can make a general list of things I want to buy, but Keep doesn’t automatically organize them. In order to effortlessly replicate what I got from AnyList, I would have to say, “Hey Google, add eggs to my grocery list,” open Keep, then move the new “eggs” entry to a created dairy section manually from this list. Keep isn’t even good for that either, because moving items on a list in the app or on the web is a terrible experience, with list items bouncing, indenting and undoing, and just being chaotic. I might as well ignore the voice command and keep it completely and just manually add the item to AnyList!

I’m not alone in this frustration either. People on Reddit made it clear that they no longer liked being able to use voice commands with AnyList and that Keep was not a good replacement. You’ll find similar complaints for Bring!, Todoist and Out Of Milk. We’ve gotten to the point where people with app development skills are trying to work around the problem, like with this project that extracts information from Keep to Todoist. There is a similar project for move list items from Keep to AnyListbut unfortunately it doesn’t have a release yet.

The situation becomes even more infuriating when you realize that Siri and Alexa still support this function. So I could buy a cheap Echo Dot (or iPhone) and use it just for that one thing. However, my entire smart home is already built around Google, so that would just be silly.

The crazy thing, though, is that it’s been over a year since Google removed this feature, and I’m always upset about this. I always get frustrated every time I add something to Keep, and it just ends up at the top of my unorganized grocery list. I get even angrier when I stop myself from adding anything to Keep and make a mental note to manually add it to AnyList later. I admit, I’ve also gotten into the habit of saying, “Hey Google, set a reminder in 10 minutes for me to add eggs to the grocery list.” » Then I get this reminder the next time my hands are clean and I manually add eggs to AnyList. This is the stupidest workaround ever, but at least it works.

Any way you slice it, it’s patently ridiculous that Google came up with something so simple and useful and then took it down. I understand that maintaining the API for this feature probably required too many resources to make it worth it, especially when it helps third-party apps like AnyList more than Google itself. But at some point, making your users worse off has to be a bad idea, right?

My only hope is that the inevitable arrival of Gemini on smart speakers and displays Google will fix this problem. If Google opened Gemini extensions to any third-party app that wanted access to them, AnyList could recreate the same functionality it had in Assistant but in Gemini. Conversely, Google could give Gemini the ability to use its generative AI powers to better create and maintain Keep lists. Either way, I and everyone else who is upset about the disappearance of Notes and Lists would be happy again.

But who knows when that might happen. Until then, I’ll just bitterly jump through hoops to do something I did for years without a problem before Google decided to make my life less convenient.