Use your hands to set up alarms on Google Home Hub and Lenovo Smart Display

If you picked up the Google Home Hub or Lenovo Smart Display during your Black Friday shopping, make sure to update them first. Both devices quietly received updates that provide a new way to create alarms: by touch.

Previously, you could only use your voice to set up alarms. This update introduces a welcome change, especially seeing how the Smart Display and Home Hub feature touchscreen displays.

The updates also include device-specific tweaks for specific functions. With the Smart Display, you can now save recipes as part of a virtual cookbook, say “turn off the screen” when you are done with the Smart Display, and enable the Nest Hello doorbell’s two-way talk with touch.

You can check out the rest of the Smart Display update’s changelog here. The update is rolling out now, but it might take a bit until your Smart Display gets it.

As for the Home Hub, 9to5Google noted that the update also made slight tweaks to the control panel. When you swipe up from the bottom of the screen, the control panel now shows five icons: brightness, volume, mute, alarms, and settings. The brightness and volume icons act as toggles, with the volume icon, in particular, showing two sliders that control media and alarm volume.

The control panel previously revealed sliders to adjust the brightness and volume, along with icons for Do Not Disturb and settings.

The updates arrive as versions 4.4.1.16+prod for the Smart Display and 1.36 for the Home Hub. At the time of this writing, the Home Hub’s update is only available for those that signed up for Google’s Preview Program. We do not know when the update will make it to other Home Hub devices.