to be honest, considering Google's 0-fucks-given for its non-paying users, which is the majority, i hesitate to touch and build on any of its tech/APIs.
someone correct me if i'm wrong, constructive criticism welcome.
Start building Actions on Google
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#32Pretty 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 Fan…
The problem with protocol activation is that there are a million different endpoints and you either * Keep a list of every single one that apps can opt into. This is how you end up with "midsized_sedan_carwashing" in an enum list. It's a developer drain for Google/Microsoft/Amazon and creates "wait for the next release for 'largetruck_carwashing' so you can release your app". * Let apps run wild and claim any protoco…
Maybe Assistant could somehow monitor what kind of things users are asking a particular app to do and use that to determine defaults for specific actions in future interactions. Imagine:
"Okay Google, get me movie tickets for Rogue One on Tuesday"
"I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that yet. Try telling me to ask another service like Fandango or MovieTickets.com."
"Ask Fandango"
"Okay. [Switches to Fandango.] What theater do you want to see Rogue One at?"
---
Later when I ask for movie tickets again...
"Okay Google, get me a movie ticket for Moana."
"I'm not sure how to do that. Would you like me to ask Fandango?"
"Sure"
"Okay. [Switches to Fandango.] What theater do you want to see Moana at?"
---
Later still...
"Okay Google, get me a movie ticket for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them."
"Sure, let me ask Fandango... [Switches to Fandango.]"
---
You get the idea. And if a user ever wants to use a different service, they can always ask for it explicitly.
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#33Any info on the pricing? Amazon always has its pricing info along with any announcements. and yes I like this chatboot API from google, to compete with amazon lex/polly. Competition will bring out the best for developers.
It's free.
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#34Any info on the pricing? Amazon always has its pricing info along with any announcements. and yes I like this chatboot API from google, to compete with amazon lex/polly. Competition will bring out the best for developers.
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Re: Start building Actions on Google
#35API.AI is really great but I really don't like this UX. From using and developing for the Amazon Echo for the last year or so this "Conversational" setup just sounds super unnatural. You want bus times: Amazon: "Alexa, ask [nextbus] [for the next bus]" Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [nextbus] when is the next bus?" Perfect: "[keyword], when is the next bus?" (context set in advance for the specific bus you care…
I was pretty impressed the other day by what hobby roboticists are now able to build leveraging stuff like api.ai:
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#36This is awesome. This was the biggest drawback of Alexa to build any meaningful apps. Its like they read my comment on HN from 3 days ago :D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073236
With LEX and Polly anyone can essentially build its own Alexa chatbot nowadays. Alexa will just be Amazon-version of it. I expect more apps and more devices will compete with Alexa as different products.
Api.ai from Google can also be integrated into many popular apps(twitter,facebook messenger,etc), not sure if it's apps-agnostic, i.e. I write an Android app and can use google assistant directly, do I need any special API-key or something from Google first?
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#37Google says you don't need to enable skills or actions, you can just say "Tell XXX". Can anyone work out what happens if there are multiple actions registered with the same invocation name?
My guess is they simply won't allow that. Every action will require a unique name.
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#38Any info on the pricing? Amazon always has its pricing info along with any announcements. and yes I like this chatboot API from google, to compete with amazon lex/polly. Competition will bring out the best for developers.
It's free.
just registered and got an email saying, for pricing please email sales@api.ai, so I guess it is not free, and it needs not to be, just not enough straightforward info comparing to Amazon's announcements.
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#39Any info on the pricing? Amazon always has its pricing info along with any announcements. and yes I like this chatboot API from google, to compete with amazon lex/polly. Competition will bring out the best for developers.
Their basic unsupported tier (up to 1 query/sec on avg) is free. You have to contact them if you want pricing for a supported plan.
This type of opaque pricing normally annoys me, but they were recently acquired by Google so I expect the pricing to eventually become more transparent and most likely be fairly reasonable.
Re: Start building Actions on Google
#40Why won't they release Assistant for all Android phones? Nobody uses Allo, and Pixel is a small minority of the market.
So what's the difference between google now, the google voice search thing at the top of my android galaxy s5, the pixel assistant, and the allo assistant?
Because they are all different, to my eyes. They all have different commands they can do. It's just obscene.