Inbox Assists: How to Update

As you all know, Inbox by Gmail offers a pretty robust system for reminders. Included in this systme of reminders is a great feature referred to as assists. Essentially, assists help you finish your thought, or make taking action on your reminder that much simpler.


Assists come in multiple forms, including email, calls or travel. Entering reminders for these will add the appropriate email address, telephone number, flight info, or even weather information.

However the best assists are those that lead to additional assists. Such as entering Call Plumber, Call Dentist, or similar.  When you enter a reminder like these, you are then prompted with a follow up question, Who is your plumber or Who is your dentist? You can click on that question and search for the entry. The search does not search your contacts, but rather searches the internet, so you need to search for the entry using the way the business is listed on the internet.  For example, if your dentists name is John Smith, but the business entry on Google is listed as Smith John you would need to search Smith John to get the correct entry.

Now that you have assigned this entry to the assist, every time you enter a reminder for calling the dentist, it will automatically attach the appropriate contact information. This is very convenient and useful, until of course your dentist changes.

How do you update this information? You need to go and snooze any item in your Inbox by Gmail and select Pick Place, then Edit the place you want to change. From here you can delete it or enter a new business search and save it.

Its a bit clunky, but hopefully the Inbox team is looking into ways to improve this process.