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Start building Actions on Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Start building Actions on Google

#3

Post by jasonallen »

Amazon lost the phone and tablet wars, so they shifted their focus to the voice assistant market, and are now ahead of competitors with their Alexa skills SDK. It's great to see Google now step up too. I expect Microsoft and Apple follow suit.

It's pretty easy to imagine how one could port simple 'voice command' apps between platforms ('hey, order a pizza/uber/etc...). Over time, however, these platforms should emerge into substantial AI. To be useful they will need to remember and understand more subtle contexts. "Hey, what's the score of the game" will have to remember that I like the Seahawks and Sounders, but only the Sounders are playing live right now, etc...

I like Google's choice to include a "conversational" model to the application design. "Let me talk to " is pretty natural and allows to then have full control of the interaction. Alexa's "ask to " model makes it easier to fire off simple commands, but awkward for deeper ones.

Re: Start building Actions on Google

#4

Post by Ajedi32 »

Pretty neat, but from a user's perspective I'm a little disappointed that the current implementation seems to require me to explicitly tell Google what app I want to interact with. I'd rather be able to just ask Google "Find me a movie ticket for Rogue One on Thursday" and have it be able to infer that I want to use the movie tickets app installed on my phone, than for me to have to explicitly say "Let me talk to Fandango" first.

That said, it looks like deeper integrations are coming:

> We'll continue to add more platform capabilities over time, including the ability to make your integrations available across the various Assistant surfaces like Pixel phones and Google Allo. We'll also enable support for purchases and bookings as well as deeper Assistant integrations across verticals.

Re: Start building Actions on Google

#5

Post by maxerickson »

jasonallen wrote: post #3

Amazon lost the phone and tablet wars, so they shifted their focus to the voice assistant market, and are now ahead of competitors with their Alexa skills SDK. It's great to see Google now step up too. I expect Microsoft and Apple follow suit. It's pretty easy to imagine how one could port simple 'voice command' apps between platforms ('hey, order a pizza/uber/etc...). Over time, however, these platforms should emerg…

Google Now is about 95% of the way there on the sports thing (it is always showing me information about a couple of teams it knows I am interested in, including game status).

Re: Start building Actions on Google

#6

Post by nevi-me »

I was looking at the page earlier today, wondering when it's being launched. Great timing as my days at work are over for the rest of the year.

I'm working on a public-transport chatbot in South Africa, planning on making it available on Twitter, Facebook, and Allo (though less users here). Going to be a fun December and January!

Re: Start building Actions on Google

#8

Post by adamVoiceLabs »

tomcart wrote: post #2

Hmm, the lack of installation on the skill is interesting and an obvious contrast to Alexa/Echo. Should we be expecting an arms race here for sensible invocation names?

Great question - we are under NDA, but I can share that Google is going to make priority 1 -> 10 the consumer experience, and priority 11 how to improve visibility through SEO. Think SEO to get the lion share of traffic.
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