This Is How To Tell Google Assistant To Set Brightness To Max

When Samsung introduced its own Bixby smart personal assistant, it claimed to have one feature no other rival assistant has: almost complete voice control over almost all functions of a phone. While expectations didn't exactly meet reality, it did deliver some of that to some degree. That said, others like Google Assistant can also control some aspects of your phone by voice alone. The trick, like in setting your phone's maximum or minimum brightness, is knowing the right thing to say.

You would expect that if you said, "OK, Google, set brightness to maximum" or "set brightness to 100" it would work as you might expect. That is, it would crank up the brightness to full. Curiously enough, it doesn't always work that way.

One user reports that asking Google Assistant to set the brightness to maximum doesn't always work. Others say it does. It's rather inconsistent and may depend on manufacturer settings.

Telling it to "set brightness to 100%" results in an apology for being unable to process your request. Funnily enough, telling it to set the brightness to 100 works but not as you might think. The slider goes to less than half the brightness. That's because Google Assistant interprets this "100" not as "100%" but as 100 out of 255 levels. 255 happens to be the maximum value you can fit in one byte (8 bits). It also usually represents the fullest value possible in many things related to computers, like colors, for example.

At this point you might wonder if it's worth all that trouble just to tell Google Assistant to push brightness to its limits. Especially when your fingers can do it faster. Of course, the feature might be your only resort when your hands are full or gloved, but know that Google Assistant may not always understand your intention, as is the case with many AI assistants anyway.