Category: Google Assistant

In today’s chapter of “It’s cool living in the future”, Google Lens is now broadly rolling out real time information and text selection features via Google Assistant.  The new features, which were highlighted at Google I/O a few weeks back, trickled out to some last week but now it appears that Google has pushed the cloud-side big button and it is now going out to everyone.

There are few different elements that are rolling out today that are pretty magical.  First, there is real time information element.  When you enable Google Lens (long press your Home button to activate Google Assistant and then tap the Lens icon in the lower right corner), you can point your camera at different objects.  If it recognized that object, you will get a colored bubble over that item which you can then tap and Assistant will give you information about it.

While it has been pretty clear the past couple of weeks the work that Google has put into Google Assistant on phones, that isn’t the only place they have been improving things.  Wear OS by Google has also been getting a lot of updates lately around Assistant and other features which has significantly improved the overall usefulness of Assistant on your wrist.

Just before Google I/O, Wear OS got a big update that, amongst other things, brought support for Actions in Google Assistant.  As part of that, you can now ask Assistant on your watch to give you a game or score update and have the information displayed on your screen in an easy-to-view format as well as an audio update on the game.

It has taken a while, a lot longer than it should have frankly, but Google Home is now finally able to start up a movie or television show from Google Play Movies & TV.  The feature quietly snuck into Home and Google Assistant this week during Google I/O and didn’t get a lot of fanfare but it closes a loop in Google’s support of their own products.

If you have a Google Home and you have movies or television shows you have rented or purchased in Play Movies & TV, you can now ask Google Assistant to play a movie in your account to a Chromecast device in your home.  It works just like it does with Netflix and other services that are already supported by Home & Assistant.

It hasn’t taken Google long to bring some great new features to Google Assistant.  After announcing both new voices and customized routines yesterday at Google I/O, both are now live and available.  You can find Routines in the Google Assistant App under Settings>Routines.  There you will find a Floating Action Button (FAB) that will allow you to create a personalize routine for your Assistant.

The customization allows you to tell Google Assistant what to do when you give a particular command.  There are a lot of pre-built command that can be setup with just a couple of taps.

Today at Google I/O, the company announced some big new features are coming to Google Assistant.  In the coming months, Assistant will be able to handle multiple actions at once while also being able to continue a conversation with you as you interact with it.  This will be available on Google Home and on your Android and iOS phones.

Continuing conversations is a huge step forward as it will allow you to link various conversation elements together into one interaction without having to say “Hey Google” between each command.  It will make Assistant – which will also have six new voices – more conversational and natural to interact with in your day.

Today in Mountain View, California, the home of Google, the tech giant will be kicking off their annual developers conference.  Google I/O is one of the more important events and is the second developer conference going on this week behind Microsoft’s Build conference.

The event kicks off this morning at 10:00 am Pacific (1:00 pm Eastern) with the keynote address from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.  You can watch the streaming of his keynote on the Google I/O site, https://google.com/io for free.