Google Assistant 'Shopping List' not working for some users, issue escalated

Over the last few weeks, some users have been reporting that the Google Assistant ‘Shopping List’ feature is not working for them or that the behavior is erratic, not responding correctly to voice commands. Apparently, the problems began after the migration of ‘Assistant Notes’ and ‘Shopping Lists’ to Keep announced a few months ago.

The unification of all the lists you made in Google Assistant with the Keep note-taking service was made for a more cohesive experience between all the company’s services. After all, it could get a little confusing to have multiple separate instances of notes taken instead of having them all available in one place, and what better place than Keep for that? The company stated that all ‘Assistant Notes’ and ‘Shopping Lists’ would be transferred to Keep without problems and would be accessible as they were until then.

However, the change appears to be causing performance issues related to Assistant voice commands for notes across multiple platforms. Assistant is present not only on mobile devices, but also on the company’s smart speakers so that you can control all compatible services and get audible responses (such as checking your notes or adding new ones) through voice commands.

Users affected by the issue where Assistant ‘Shopping List’ feature is not working correctly report situations such as lists being created separately each time new items are added instead of being added to the current Keep account, being unable to add new items to lists, or not being able to check the items of a list (they get an error message). There are also cases where people try to add an item to the list and receive no response, but the new item is present when checking the Keep app.

That said, a Google Product Expert confirmed on the support forums that the Assistant dev team is already aware of the ‘Shopping List’ issues and they are being investigated, but there is no ETA for a fix yet. Meanwhile, a Redditor recommended the workaround below, which, although it was tested on an iPhone, seems reproducible on any mobile device through the Google Home app, so you can give it a try.

Let’s hope that it won’t take long for the Assistant dev team to find the source of the problem and deploy a fix, since ‘Shopping List’ is one of the most useful and practical features of the service.