No one noticed that Google has fixed Gemini's stupidest calendar limitation

It’s been nearly two years since Google released the Gemini app for Android and enabled users to switch from Assistant to Gemini despite a bunch of limitations and missing features. One of those was the lack of multiple calendar support. Without it, you couldn’t ask about events from secondary calendars, such as work, school, or family calendars, or create new ones there. It was silly, and people complained about this repeatedly (1, 2, 3) to deaf ears.

Now, two years later, Google has finally fixed this stupid oversight and added back support for multiple calendars to Gemini, so any employee, family member, or student can access their full schedule again — with a few caveats, though.

We don’t know when the change occurred exactly, but at some point in January, Google’s support page for Gemini calendar added these two sentences:

• You can also ask Gemini to create and manage events on your secondary and shared calendars in Google Calendar.
• Gemini creates events on your default calendar unless you specify a different calendar.

However, the feature isn’t as straightforward as you think, and setting up another default calendar is counterintuitive since it requires digging into the old Assistant settings. I spent a few days trying to understand how this works because I’m that one person with three important calendars who’s been really annoyed by Gemini’s restriction. Here’s what you should know.

Gemini supports multiple calendars, but not multiple accounts

Google Assistant had spoiled us with its multiple calendar and multiple account support. Someone like me, with three Google accounts — personal, work, family — could easily give access to many calendars from each of these accounts and not worry about where an event was saved. If I asked, “What’s on my calendar today?” I always got the full list of events, regardless of whether they were work meetings, personal tasks, or family dinners.

Gemini supports the calendars from one Google account, but it can finally read secondary and shared calendars under that account. If you want Gemini to access your schedule from something like a work or school account, you’ll have to share that calendar with your personal Google account. That’s what I did; I shared my family’s calendar with my main account, and now when I ask what’s on my schedule, it tells me about my personal and family events, too. That’s already a huge relief; I had stopped relying on Gemini for anything calendar-related for two years because it was restricted to one schedule.

And when adding events, you can specify exactly which calendar you want to add to. “Add a dinner tomorrow at 8 PM to my [insert name here] calendar” works on mobile and web. For me, it bugs out on my Google Nest speakers and hubs, but your mileage may vary.

Change the default calendar that Gemini creates events on

By default, Gemini uses the primary calendar from your Google account whenever you ask it to make a new event. If you often add events to another calendar (for me, that’s my family calendar) and you don’t want to keep typing or saying “to my X calendar” for each new event, and/or you want to do this on your smart speaker or hub without it bugging out, you can switch the default under the decrepit Google Assistant settings.

To do so, open the Google Home app or the main Google app on your phone, tap on your profile image in the top right, then Settings > Google Assistant. Once there, look for Calendar. There, tap on the pencil under Default calendar to create events and choose any calendar under your primary Google account. Forget about the other accounts if you have them, because as I said, Gemini doesn’t see them.

If you do change your default calendar, you can still add events to your main calendar by saying “Add [event name] to my personal calendar.” This circumvents the new default and sends events to the main calendar under your email address. It’s what I’ve been using to add personal events, since I switched my default to my family calendar.

It’s worth noting that you can try ticking on/off any calendar in the Your calendars section, but in my experience, that doesn’t change anything in the way Gemini answers questions or in the events it tells you about. I’ve tried to give it access to my work calendar from my Android Authority email address, but it just ignores it because it’s under a separate Google account. (If I wanted Gemini to see it, I’d have to share it with my personal email account, and for now, I’ve chosen not to do that.)