Thanks to Google Assistant, you’ll never lose your car in the parking lot again—but you shouldn’t be losing it anyway, as you’ll get better accuracy if you remember to tell your smartphone where your parking spot is before you leave your car.
A new update from Google allows Google Assistant to automatically remember where you parked your car, though you can also trigger Google Assistant to save your spot—really, its approximation of your spot—by saying “Hey Google, remember where I parked.”
When you’re ready to return to your car, you can ask Google where you parked for a reminder. Your parking location is also viewable from as a card in Google Assistant itself.
However, as Android Police points out, Google Assistant has spotty accuracy in places where you have poor network reception. Instead of using Android Auto data, Bluetooth, or other forms of proximity tracking, Google Assistant relies on your location history to estimate your parking spot. So, you’ll know your car is in a parking garage, but you might not be able to drill down to the exact space (or close to it).
This is a way to make this location tracking more accurate, but you’ll have to remember to do it before you head out on your big shopping day.
Help Google Assistant remember exactly where you parked
Instead of relying on Google Assistant’s estimation, you should instead manually save your parking spot in Google Maps. (We recently covered how to do so for both Android and iOS.)
When you save your spot manually, Google Assistant will use this more specific location instead of its own approximation, so the response you get when you tell it to “remember where I parked” will be more accurate.
Sure, this isn’t as convenient as having Google Assistant handle everything on its own, but if you’re someone who needs a bit more help finding your car in a packed lot, this is a much better solution. Odds are that most Android users are using Google Maps by default for directions anyway—where you’ll set your parking spot by tapping on the blue dot when you’ve parked—so it’s only a minimal amount of added effort.
If you want alternatives, Waze is another option for remembering where you parked, as are the classic methods of writing down the location, snapping a photo of the cross streets or parking garage floor, or saving a voice memo to your device.
Regardless of if (or how) you use it, Google Assistant’s parking spot feature is returning via a server-side update, so you don’t have to download or update anything to try it out. You’ll have to wait if you don’t have the feature yet, but it should arrive soon.