Category: Google Assistant

Good news for those of you in the UK.  You can now make hands free calls to contacts through your Google Home or Home Mini.  The feature rolled out in the United States last August and allows you to leverage Google Assistant to place calls to contacts or business that can be found in Google search.

Using it is very easy.  Just say, “Hey Google, Call my son”.  Because I would have tagged my son in my contacts, Google Assistant will place the outbound call to my son.  If a contact has multiple numbers, you will be prompted on which number to place the call.

Google Lens, the AI-driven feature that allows for objects to be identified, has now begun broadly rolling out to Google Assistant on Android.  The feature, once available for your phone, can be accessed by opening up Google Assistant (long press the Home button) then tap the Lens icon in the lower right.

Using Google’s Artificial Intelligence, Google Lens allows you to tap an object on your display while it is active and that object will be identified.  It works on everyday things but increasingly can identify plants, trees and soon flowers too.

August, the company behind some of the best smart locks on the market, have announced a deeper, more direct integration with Google Assistant.  Now owners of the smart locks will be able to directly interact with them from Assistant.

To be clear, August has worked with Google Assistant for about a year ago and to access your locks, you had to say, “Hey Google, talk to August”.  Now you can simply say, “Hey Google, is the front door locked?” and Assistant will interact with your August lock directly to determine if it is locked or not.

Google has released the first schedule for this year’s Google I/O event in Mountain View and it is evident that Android and Google Assistant are going to be the headliners.  The schedule has multiple Android and Assistant events over the three-day conference with everything from advanced coding sessions to general information sessions.

Some of the events slated for I/O include:

• 10 tips for building better actions (Google Assistant)
• An introduction to developing Actions for the Google Assistant
• Build an AR app with the Poly Toolkit for Unity (Android)

• What’s new in Android Wear

That’s just a few of the dozens of sessions on tap.

Today at Mobile World Congress, Google has announced the expansion of the languages supported by Actions for Google Assistant, the SDK that allows developers to leverage Assistant in their apps and solutions.  The new languages, which go live today, include:

• Hindi
• Thai
• Indonesian
• Danish
• Norwegian
• Swedish
• Dutch

These languages join English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Russian which are already supported.  The new languages are fully supported in development tools too, like DialogFlow and, of course, the Actions SDK itself.

It has been pretty clear from previous announcements that 2018 will be the year that Google puts Google Assistant in all the things.  But in an announcement today, the scope of growth that the Mountain View company has for Assistant itself became a bit more clear.  And it is impressive.

First, the plan is to have Google Assistant available in no less than 30 languages by the end of the year.  That, in their words, would get Assistant to 95% of the Android install base globally.  This is something that we got a hint about earlier this month but now it is confirmed officially.