How-to guide · Time, alarms & calendar Schedule a local reminder

Actionreminder_at
Audience Cognitive
Time Under 5 seconds to schedule
Permissions Notifications (already granted at first launch)
What this is: A quiet, private nudge that fires from Aside itself — not from the Clock app, not from your calendar. Tell Aside what you want to be reminded of and when, and a real Android notification arrives at that moment, with the message you said. The reminder fires even if Aside is closed and even if the phone has gone to sleep, because Aside schedules it through Android’s exact-alarm system. This is the right tool for low-stakes nudges — “stretch in 30 minutes,” “drink a glass of water at 4 p.m.,” “get up and walk around in an hour” — that don’t need a full alarm or a calendar event.
Try it now

Open Aside on your phone, then say or type:

“Remind me in 30 minutes to stretch.”

Aside confirms in the chat history. Thirty minutes later, with Aside closed and the screen off, your phone will buzz with a notification reading “Remind: stretch.” Tap the notification to open Aside; swipe it away to dismiss.

Step by step

  1. Open Aside

    Tap the Aside icon, or trigger your assist gesture if you’ve set Aside as your default assistant. Aside opens to the orb in its idle state.

    The Aside main screen at idle on a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. Across the top: the word ‘Aside’ with a red dot, a small mono status pill reading ‘● IDLE’, the cost counter ‘$2.354 today’, and a ‘NEW’ link top-right. Centered is the warm-paper-colored orb with a soft brown core, breathing slowly. Below the orb in large bold type: ‘Tell me everything,’. Below that, in lighter type: ‘Tap the orb or type below.’. Near the bottom is a clay-colored pill button reading ‘Make Aside my assistant’. Below that is a row of four mono pills: ‘history’, ‘type’, ‘muted’, ‘memory · 3’.
    Aside open at idle.

  2. Say (or type) what to remind you of, and when

    Hold the orb to talk and say “Remind me in 30 minutes to stretch,” or tap the type pill and type the same. The time can be relative (“in five minutes,” “in an hour,” “in two and a half hours”) or absolute (“at 4pm,” “at 9:30 tonight”). The reminder text is whatever follows to.

    Remind me in 30 minutes to stretch.
    The Aside main screen now in the listening state. The status pill at the top has changed to ‘● LISTENING…’ in clay-red type, with the cost counter still at ‘$2.354 today’ next to it. Because the listening pill is wider than IDLE, the ‘NEW’ link top-right has wrapped vertically as ‘N E W’ in stacked letters. The orb is the same warm shape with a softly diffused outline. Beneath the orb a single centered sentence reads ‘I’m listening.’ The bottom pill row (‘history’, ‘type’, ‘muted’, ‘memory · 3’) and the clay-colored ‘Make Aside my assistant’ button are still present.
    Orb shifts to listening once the mic activates.

  3. See Aside confirm the reminder is scheduled

    Aside replies in both audio and text. The chat history shows your transcribed request, Aside’s spoken reply, and an Aside note chip showing the action that was performed — in this case reminder_at +30m “stretch”. The reminder is now scheduled inside Aside’s alarm subsystem, which talks to Android’s AlarmManager directly. You can close the app; it will still fire.

    The Aside main screen with the chat history bottom sheet covering the lower half of the screen. The status pill at the top reads ‘● READY’ and the cost counter shows ‘$2.451 today’. Behind a slight scrim the orb is dimmed; the words ‘Tell me everything,’ are still partially visible above the sheet. Inside the sheet, three stacked entries: a small mono label ‘YOU’ above the line ‘Remind me in 35 seconds to check slot 110109.’; a label ‘ASIDE’ above the line ‘Reminder set for 35 seconds.’; and a clay-tinted ‘ASIDE NOTE’ chip reading ‘▶ reminder in <1 min: check slot 110109’ — the explicit action marker. (The capture script uses a 35-second test reminder so the notification fires within the run; the public SOP teaches a 30-minute reminder, which behaves the same way.)
    Aside confirms the reminder is scheduled. The action chip shows the offset and the text Aside will say back to you.

  4. Receive the notification at the scheduled moment

    Half an hour later — even if the screen is off, even if Aside has been swiped out of recents — a notification slides in. The icon is the Aside mark; the title is Aside reminder; the body is your text (stretch). Tap the notification to open Aside in case you want to follow up (“remind me again in twenty minutes”). Swipe it away to dismiss it.

    The Samsung notification shade pulled down on the Galaxy S23 Ultra. At the top: the date-time line ‘11:00 Wed, May 6’. The first card in the list is the freshly fired Aside reminder — a small warm-paper Aside icon with a clay dot at the left, the title ‘Aside reminder’ in bold above the body line ‘check slot 110109’, and the timestamp ‘11:02 a.m.’ at the right. Below the Aside reminder are unrelated pre-existing notifications (a logged-out WhatsApp banner, a LinkedIn job alert, a missed-Instagram count, a SIM-not-provisioned card, and so on).
    The notification fires at the scheduled time even if Aside is closed and the phone is locked.
Reminders ≠ alarms ≠ timers: Reminders are quiet, single-line notifications — great for low-friction nudges. If you need a sound that wakes you up, use an alarm. If you need a countdown you can see ticking down, use a timer. Aside picks the best one for what you said, but you can ask for a specific kind: “set an alarm for 4 p.m.” versus “remind me at 4 p.m.”
A note on precision: On the Play Store, Aside no longer requests the special exact-alarm permission — Google reserves that for clock and calendar apps. The reminder fires within roughly a minute of the time you said. For most kitchen-stretching, water-drinking nudges that’s fine; for a hard deadline (“leave for the airport at 11:00”), set an actual alarm instead.