Google Assistant to come to Android Nougat and Marshmallow

The Google Assistant on the Samsung Galaxy S7, LG V20, and HTC 10

One of the biggest differentiators for Google Pixel and Home is now coming to more Android devices. Google just announced at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona that starting this week smartphones running Android 7.0 Nougat and Android 6.0 Marshmallow will be getting Google Assistant. It’ll be coming first to English users in the U.S. and then those in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. German users will also be getting this in Germany soon. Google promises to add more languages over the coming year. So devices such as the just launched LG G6 will be getting Google Assistant.

Google Assistant on Allo can share personal data if you let it

Sometimes a colleague or friend needs a contact number for you and it’ll take you a few swipes and taps on your device to get that info. Hoping to make it easier for you, Google Allo added a new capability to Assistant on its service. You can ask it to look up upcoming calendar events, contacts, or a flight. It’ll then ask for your permission to share the information. When you press “Share Now,” it’ll then be sent in the chat window you’re in. To get access to this feature, you might need Allo version 6.0.

Source: Android Police

Google Assistant might be making its way to Nexus devices

One of the things that set new Pixel devices apart from its Nexus predecessors was Google’s Assistant feature. But that might not be the case in the near future. 9to5Google’s Stephen Hall tweeted that Google informed him that Assistant is coming to future updates of the Nexus 5X and 6P. If this happens, the feature will follow in the footsteps of the fingerprint gesture, which arrived first on the Pixel and has made its way to the Nexus 5X because of popular demand. If true, this move might also be good for Google to help develop the machine learning capabilities as well as expand the user base of Google Assistant.

Source: Mashable

‘Actions on Google’ to open Google Assistant to third-party developers

If Google plans to unseat the Amazon Echo in its own category, it’ll need all the help it can get. And that’s what it is planning to do with the Actions on Google program launching in December. This program will allow developers to build “Actions” for Google Assistant (akin to the 3,000+ “skills” of Amazon’s Alexa). There will be two flavors to this: Direct Actions and Conversation Actions. Direct is similar to what you can do with Siri, Alexa, and even Google’s own Google Now voice assistant. You ask it for information, schedule a meeting, etc.

Conversations, on the other hand and as its name suggests, is more of a back and forth. One example given at the Google event is when Scott Huffman tried to get an Uber and had Google Assistant pass the conversation off to Uber to finalize the request. And that’s where developers would need to work with Google. Aside from the Google plans to release an Embedded Google Assistant software development kit to let tinkerers load Google Assistant on things like Raspberry Pi as well as for other hardware manufacturers to have Assistant in other products.

Source: The Verge