I Think You’re Asking About A Timer

Photo by CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1350341

That’s what the Google Home responds when you’ve made a mistake.

In the heat of cooking, you had asked to set a timer for 5 minutes. Now, a long time has passed and somethings is burning, so you ask the device to tell you how much time is remaining and it coughs up this answer.

You never set a timer.

This happens more often with the Google Home for a few reasons:

• There’s only a faint visual acknowledgement of a trigger
• There is no visual indication of a timer
• The form factor makes it less likely to pick up voice at a distance (purely speculative… not tested… based on personal experience)

The benefit of Google Assistant is that it let’s you down easily, rather than saying no timers have been set. However, it does take some time to get to the point, asking for disambiguation.

Timers are one of the voice killer apps. It might be good to bias the system towards detecting this type of command.