Google Assistant's breached password auto-change feature is finally rolling out to users

Improving your security shouldn’t be time-wasting

Last year, Google announced it would be introducing a feature in Chrome for Android that would allow Assistant to help you change stolen passwords with a few taps. The company had said the new experience would roll out gradually, but it's only about now that more than a handful of users have started to get it on their devices.

In the past, Chrome would warn you if your stored passwords were unsafe or reused from a data breach. However, you had to manually navigate to the website with the problem and change the password yourself.

With this update, you’ll be prompted as soon as you log into a site with a password that’s been compromised. The dialogue box will have a nice, big Assistant-branded "Change automatically" button, as shared by Android Police’s Max Weinbach. Once tapped, a confirmation sheet will pop up which you'll need to agree to. You'll then be taken directly to the affected website to set up a new password for the account. Here, you can type in your own key or let the built-in password manager suggest one. Assistant can handle the entire process for you from start to finish, but you do have the option to take over at any stage.

The feature doesn’t work on all sites, though, as you can see from the screenshot below. Google has yet to publish requirements for websites to support auto-change, but it stands to reason that the list of venues will start small and gradually grow.

Like before, you can also manually trigger a password check by navigating to Chrome settings > Passwords, where you’ll also see the blue Assistant-branded "Change password" button for compromised login credentials.

The feature is possible thanks to Google's Duplex on the Web, which parses site content to automate specific processes. Google uses it for things like ordering out via Search and has now extended it to changing account passwords.