Google Home, and by extension Google Assistant, has quietly added iCal support for subscribed calendars in your Google Calendar. To this point, Google Home could only read your primary calendar as well as holiday and birthday calendars. But subscribed calendars couldn’t be read. That now has changed.
If you have subscribed to an iCal calendar, you now have the option to add it to your list of calendars that can be read by Google Home and you can be updated when you ask about an event.
For example, if you look at the screenshot below from my Home app, you will see that I have selected my Formula 1 2018 calendar as one that can be accessed & read.
iCal Support in Google Home
That means when I ask Google assistant about events for a particular day, I will also get F1 race event information as well as my normal calendar stuff.
It is a small step but it is a good one and hopefully this is an indicator of other calendars being able to be read by Home and Assistant. Personally I still would love to see my Office 365 calendar be read from Google Home. I work from home a lot and being able to have that would be a huge win. But again, baby steps. I take what I can get for now.
To add a calendar to your Google Home settings, go to the Home app, open up More Settings, go down to Calendar and you should see all of your iCal calendars there. Tick the box and that’s all you need to do.
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