Category: Google Assistant

Good news today for those of you who use Fandango to get your movie tickets.  You can now use Google Assistant on your phone to find movie times near you and order your tickets all with voice commands.   You can continue to use the Fandango app of course but now you have a voice enabled option.  Sweet!

The feature only works on Assistant on your phone and while you can ask your Google Home for details, it is going to move the process over to your phone to complete it.  Hopefully it’ll get fully enabled on home at some point but as you can see after the break, the interaction with Assistant on your phone is pretty visual instead of just blurting out a bunch of movie times.

Google today announced several new improvements coming to Google Assistant on Wear OS by Google.  The updates will take a few days to roll out to everyone and will give Assistant on your watch the ability to leverage Actions from Assistant and improved voice responses.

Google Assistant on Wear OS is not new.  It rolled out with the latest generation of watches running what was then Android Wear 2.0.  Rebranded as Wear OS by Google over the course of the past few months, Google has been focusing efforts on overall improvements in the platform as well with Assistant.

Google has begun rolling out a new cloud-side update to Google Lens, the applet inside of Google Assistant and Google Photos, enabling it to identify both dog and cat breeds you see or in your photos.  The new feature is making its way out broadly to users so it is likely that you already have it so long as you have the latest Google app on your phone.

Previously, when you used Google Lens on a photo of a dog or cat, either by using it in Assistant or in Photos, it would simply come up with a generic “looks like a cat” or “a cat” but it didn’t provide any breed information.

The expansion of Google Assistant and Google Home globally continues with India becoming the latest country where you can buy the smart speakers.  The Home and Home Mini are now available there and support a wide range of apps and services found in country.  As for price, the Google Home is  ₹9,999 (roughly $154 US) while the Home Mini is  ₹4,499, or $69 US.  Both are available exclusively through Flipkart.

While Google recently rolled out Hindi support for Google Assistant, they aren’t supported in India on the Home devices just yet.  For now, users will have to use English (India) as their settings but Hindi support is expected shortly.

Here is another great example of how fun it is to live in the future.  Google has rolled out a new feature for Google Assistant that allows you to send money to a contact from you Google Pay account all by voice command.  Now you can sort out sending cash to a friend or family member immediately and, more importantly, securely.

The feature works by you saying something to the effect, “Hey Google, send $20 to Rob for beer” and you will be prompted for which Rob if you have multiple Rob’s in your contacts.  Once the contact is identified, you will be prompted by Assistant to confirm the funds transfer and then use your fingerprint to actually authorize the transfer.  That’s it!

Earlier this week I posted about Google Assistant now supporting the Italian language.  The question, as I posed in that post, was if it was a prelude to the Italian Google Store seeing Google Home coming soon.  Now we know the answer is yes.

On the Google Store site in Italy, you can now purchase a Google Home or Google Home Mini.  Home is €149, about $183 while the Home Mini is €59 or about $72 US.  They are on sale now and both models are available.