Google tests setting business hours by typing them out
A small test could replace the day by day hours form with a single box you type into.
Google Business Profiles, the free listing that shows your business on Google Search and Maps, is testing a way to set your opening hours by typing them out as ordinary text. Barry Schwartz reported the test after it was spotted by Ayman Ali. Instead of picking an open time and a close time for each day of the week, you would write the hours the way you would say them out loud and Google would fill in the rest.
testing setting your business hours automatically through basic text
What we know
Not much beyond that. Schwartz described it as Google "testing setting your business hours automatically through basic text". There is no announcement from Google, no start date, and no word on whether this becomes a permanent feature. Tests like this often show up for a small share of accounts and sometimes never ship at all, so most business owners will not see anything different in their dashboard today.
Why hours are worth caring about
Opening hours are one of the few things on your listing that a customer acts on immediately. Someone searching on a phone sees whether you are open now, and if that answer is wrong, they go somewhere else. Anything that makes the hours field faster to fill in is useful mainly because it removes an excuse to leave it out of date.
What to do
Nothing, for now. This is a test and nobody knows if it will roll out.
If you want to do something useful with the two minutes, open your Google Business Profile, click into the hours section, and check that every day is right, including the days you are closed. Then check your holiday hours for the next couple of months. Wrong hours during a holiday is the single most common way a listing sends a customer to a locked door.
If the new text box does appear for you, read back what Google filled in before you save it. A feature that guesses your hours from a sentence can guess wrong, and the listing is what customers trust.