How to Use Google Home to Remember Where You Put Your Stuff

Google Home can help you remember important things, like where you put your passport or what your Wi-Fi password is. Here’s how use it to remember all the stuff you constantly forget.

The new “remember” command lets you make verbal notes about specific things that you’re likely to forget. It works best for something that isn’t likely to change very often, like where you keep your social security card or your apartment’s gate code. You also probably shouldn’t use it for private info like credit card numbers, since anyone in the house (including guests) can access it.

You don’t need to tweak any settings or enable a third-party service to use this feature. As long as your Google Home is connected to the internet—and it would be pretty useless otherwise—it should be updated and ready to go.

First, you’ll need to give it something to remember. Start by saying “Ok Google, remember that I put my passport in a lock box”, for example.

When you want to recall that information, ask for it by saying “Ok Google, where is my passport?”

Google will then read back everything you said before. Google seems to scan for keywords to pull up the relevant piece of information. For the above example, you can ask “where’s my passport?” or “where’s my lockbox?” and Google will pull up the same result (even though the second isn’t really answering the right question.)

This can sometimes result in a conflict if you use the same keywords in multiple places. For example, I added “Remember that my lockbox is in my closet.” I then asked “where is my lockbox?” and Google told me that my passport is in my lockbox. Usually this doesn’t cause a problem, but it’s probably best if you make each memory as unique as possible.

If you want to remove something you asked Google to remember, you can ask Google to forget it. For example, “Ok Google, forget that my passport is in my lock box.”