Google Assistant uses third-party services when first-party responses aren’t available

A Google Home user recently asked the Assistant about the current weather and was greeted with a response about checking it with a third-party service. If this has happened to you, don’t worry, this isn’t an ad…

As you can see in the video below, Colm O Sullivan, the person who uploaded the video to YouTube, asks their Google Home, “What’s the weather?” In response, Google Assistant said, “Alright. For that, you might like AccuWeather. Want to give it a try?” As you can see from the video’s title, Sullivan believed this might be an ad.

According to a Google spokesperson who talked to Search Engine Land, what the user experienced was actually a “brief outage of our first party weather response.” The experience captured in the video was actually just Google offering “the AccuWeather Action as a fall back option for users during that short window.”

What this means is that theoretically, even if Google’s different services like its weather service go down, the user won’t be stuck with a “dumb” smart speaker. Instead, users just have to get their requested information from another source/service.