Category: Google Assistant

Google’s continuing effort to “Google Assist all the things” continues with an announcement from Bose this morning on a new wireless headphone that is available today.  The new QuietComfort 35 II brings all the greatness of the original QuiteComfort 35, but with an added Action button that allows you to access Google Assistant.

The new Action button is located on the left earpiece and by pressing it, you activate Google Assistant.  The headphones have a built-in microphone which has noise reduction for improved accuracy.

There is a new command in Google Assistant that makes taking a screenshot of your phone even easier.  Now you can either long press the home button on your phone or simply saying “OK Google, take a screenshot” to capture display on your phone.

The ability to capture a screenshot on virtually any Android phone (or tablet for that matter) has been available for a long time through the button combination of Power+Volume Down and it remains so today.  Further, many manufactures have included a shortcut in the Notification Shade for easy screenshots (Huawei and Lenovo for example).  Even Google at one point had a screenshot option in Google Now but none of these have been voice enabled to this point.

Google is pushing hard to get Actions on Google built for Google Assistant and one of the best ways to do that is to throw some prize money at it.  Google has announced a new contest where the top prize is $10,000 and a trip to Google I/O 2018 for a developer who creates an app leveraging Actions on Google.

For those who are not developers, Actions is the set of APIs that are leveraged to bring Google Assistant compatibility and/or integration into apps.  Google opened up the platform earlier this year and while adoption has been good, Google of course wants to make it more widely used.  Amazon right now has over 10,000 apps that tie into Alexa and Echo and Google is significantly less than that number.  This contest should help change that a bit.

One of the best apps of late last year was Gboard from Google.  It replaced Google Keyboard and it is a much smarter, faster keyboard for your Android devices and for iPhone, where it debuted originally.  Now Google has quietly added a nice new feature to Gboard when you use it within Google Assistant.  It provides you with common search phrases just above the keyboard to make interacting a bit faster.

Assuming that you have Google Assistant on your phone (if you have Android Marshmallow or Nougat, you likely do), just long press the Home button on your phone to bring up Assistant.  Normally at this point I find it faster just to speak to Assistant to get the information I need but there are times that I can’t do that (I’m in a quiet place for example).  After you open up Assistant, note the keyboard icon in the lower left corner.  Tap it and that opens up your keyboard so you can type a query.

While the feature isn’t enabled yet, it appears that Google Home will soon be getting the ability to support multiple accounts.  As a Google Home Pioneer, if there are two feature requests that have been at the top of the list, it has been multiple account support and support for Exchange calendars.  The former, at least, appears to be nearly ready.  This is something that I also pointed out in my review of Google Home back in October as being something which Google needed to address.

If you aren’t familiar with Google Home, right now you can only associate one Google account with the device.  If, for example, you and your partner want to use Home, it will only give you the calendar and other personalized information for the first account setup on the device.  The issues with this are pretty self evident:  I can get my calendar’s next appointment but when my wife asks for her, she gets mine.  Even if you add a second account to the Home app, it will only give you the personalized information for the first account.

OnePlus took to Twitter today with some good news for OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T owners.  Google Assistant is coming your way.  The built in assistant, which Google announced was coming to all devices running Marshmallow and Nougat, has been slowly making the rounds as manufactures work with Google to get it on their devices.  OnePlus is just one of the latest but it is good to see that manufactures aren’t standing in the way of getting it out to customers.

If you own a 3 or a 3T, like other devices who have already received Google Assistant, there isn’t anything you need to do other than make sure you have the latest build of the Google Search app on your phone.  That more-or-less tells Google your phone is ready to be updated on the backend.