Look, we're not engineers. And we're certainly not responsible for keeping all the various parts of one of the world's biggest technology companies running smoothly. But we can recognize a pattern. like the one where Google's reminders tool in Search keeps breaking. It looks like it's been broken for a few weeks, which will be a familiar state for the admittedly small amount of users who rely on it.

The latest outage was documented by Piunika Web, and passed along to us by Android Police readers. Specifically, we're talking about the tool in the Google Search app that allows you to set a reminder via the voice search button. At the time of writing, it's merely sending a search query for whatever you say, even with the "remind me to" identifier intact. Reminders set via voice in Google Assistant are still working fine.

The same functionality broke in 2019 and twice in 2017. It's hard to say whether the latest outage is even an outage: maybe Google has depreciated this functionality in order to focus on similar features in Assistant. In response to user reports complaining about the broken feature, a Help volunteer says that he's referred the issue to the Google Search team. But that was weeks ago, and the issue seems to be no better for the attention. It's a frustrating status quo for the small but vocal collection of users who prefer the Search interface to Assistant.

Thanks: Steve