Tag: Google Assistant

Google Assistant has grown up a lot in the past year thanks to developers and services leveraging APIs to create services for it.  While Assistant still lags behind Amazon’s Alexa when it comes to the number of services available, the gap is closing.

That presents a challenge for users who are looking for a service or feature but aren’t quite sure if it is there.  Google has addressed this and made it easy to find services for Google Assistant right from within it or the Google Home app.  Now you can simply type in a keyword to search and the Assistant will return all of the services that do that particular thing that you searched.

Last month, Google and Walmart made an announcement that shopping for the retailer would be coming to Google Express and Google Home.  That agreement has now gone live and you can find Walmart in the app as a shopping option.

Users will be able to link their Walmart online account with Google Express and shop a wide range of products from the retailer, mostly focused on groceries, and have them added to your Express shopping list.  They are then shipped to your home and if you spend over $35, the shipping is free.

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.

The slow but steady global availability of Google Home continues with the Google Assistant powered smart speaker coming to Australia and Germany.  For Aussies, Home as well as Google WiFi will be available on July 20th while Germans will have to wait until next month before Home comes to your country.  The expansion follows it coming to France and Canada earlier this year.

In Australia, Home will be available from the Google Store, JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, Officeworks, The Good Guys, Telstra, Optus and Qantas Store.  It will be $199 AUD, about $157US.  Google WiFi will be $199 for a single unit while the 3-pack will be $499.  For those in Germany, Home will be €149.

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.