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KIA Motors has announced that Google Assistant will be coming to their EVO Infotainment system on select 2018 model cars.  The integration means that owners will be able to leverage Google Assistant to issue Actions to their car and get information on their car.

“Our customers inspired this latest enhancement to the Kia ownership experience,” said Henry Bzeih, director, connected car & mobility services, strategy & planning, KMA. “With more people using smart technology at home and work, it was a natural extension to bring this easy to use and widely adapted platform to the driver’s seat. With a simple voice command, Kia owners can interface with their vehicles in the same manner they use the Google Assistant in their homes.”

The new integration will be available the K9002, Soul EV1, Niro PHEV, and the Optima PHEV this year.

As Google Assistant has grown in capabilities, both natively as well as integration from developer and manufactures, sorting out what Assistant can do has become increasingly challenging.  I have several friends who have Google Home and when they ask me if Assistant can do this or that, my default answer to this point has been, “I don’t know.  Just ask it and let’s see if it can do it.”  Now that is going to change.

Google has turned on a new Google Assistant actions page which, in one location, shows you all of the actions that Assistant can perform.  You will see the over 1 million actions that can be done natively or through 3rd party integrations.

Google is embarking on a new way for AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, are rendered that preserves the original URL.  This is a big deal as the current way that these optimized mobile pages are shown by URL introduces doubt for readers as to the original source.

First, in case you don’t know what Accelerated Mobile Pages are exactly, it is a caching system that Google uses to speed up the delivery of webpages to your mobile device.  Generally these are generated as google.com/amp/ then the site name or page.  The reason for this is due to privacy concerns of Google caching the originating URL

When we first launched AMP in Google Search we made a big trade-off: to achieve the user experience that users were telling us that they wanted, instant loading, we needed to start loading the page before the user clicked. As we detailed in a deep-dive blog post last year,  privacy reasons make it basically impossible to load the page from the publisher’s server. Publishers shouldn’t know what people are interested in until they actively go to their pages. Instead, AMP pages are loaded from the Google AMP Cache but with that behavior the URLs changed to include the google.com/amp/ URL prefix.

This trade-off has created concerns over the validity of the source information.

File this one under the “yeah, that makes sense” category.  Google has made a slew of announcements regarding Google Assistant today at CES 2018.  A lot of new products are coming out with Assistant support and with the AI-driven Assistant on over 400 million devices already, it is getting close being everywhere.

Now Google has decided to call your requests of Google Assistant what they really are:  Actions.  Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana have skills.  Assistant has Actions.  Google is referring to anything Assistant can do natively or through a third party integration as an Action going forward.