Sometimes it feels like Google Assistant can do anything, but it still lacks the ability to perform some sensitive admin commands on your smartphone. However, evidence has emerged to suggest that Google may allow its chirpy digital helper to turn off your phone.

Google Assistant's New Permissions on Your Phone

The eagle-eyed people at 9to5Google spotted the update in an APK Insight. The update bring in a potential new feature that allows Google Assistant to turn off of your phone.

In Android 12, Google made it so you can summon the assistant by long-pressing the power button. Now that users associate the power button with Google Assistant, it's only logical to then allow people to turn off their phones using a voice command.

In some documentation found within in the new update, Google says that you can turn off your phone in one of two ways. First, it tells you that you can press the power button and the volume up button together to bring up the power menu. Second, you can "open your Assistant and say 'Power off.'"

This is interesting because you currently cannot ask Google Assistant to turn off your phone. If you do, it'll instead walk you through turning off your phone manually. This caveat is likely because Google doesn't want people accidentally shutting off their phone with a misconstrued command.

Now it seems that Google wants to go ahead with this feature. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, this voice command is only noted in the documentation. That means we're unsure as to how it'll work.

For instance, if you say "Hey Google, power off," perhaps your phone will instantly shut down. Or perhaps Google Assistant will double-check to see if you did actually want to turn off your phone or if it mistook you. It may also only allow the "power off" command if you used a button to summon Assistant, to avoid people's phones turning off mid-conversation.

Regardless of which route Google takes, we'll have to wait and see what the end result looks like. That is if the end result ever surfaces; just because this documentation is hidden away in the code, doesn't mean the tech giant will definitely release it, after all.

A New Voice Command for Your Google Assistant?

A potential new "power off" command appeared in a recent update, buried away in Android's code. Whether or not it'll see the light of day, we're not sure; however, if it does, it'll allow users even more control over their device with their voice.

If your Google Assistant has issues saying your name, you'll be interested to know that you can now train it to say it correctly. You can choose to either spell it out phonetically or speak it to Google Assistant so it knows what to call you.

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