Google Assistant gets new Explore card to discover Actions

Abner Li | Oct 4 2019 - 11:22 am PT

Google Assistant has a lot of third-party capabilities called Actions. To aid discoverability, Google has long offered a browsable Explore page, and there’s now an updated card in Assistant’s Updates feed.

Since it launched last year, the Updates tab has included an “Explore using the Assistant” section at the very bottom. This card noted categories of Actions, and featured updating lists like “What’s trending,” “You might like,” and “What’s popular.” Each featured a command with the responsible app’s name and icon displayed.

Over the past week, Google has redesigned the card. It’s now under the “Keep Track of Things” header alongside trips, recent Gmail orders, and stock listings. The new card is titled, “More things you can do with the Google Assistant.”

It updates with every refresh of the feed and just shows one category of Actions at a time. “Enjoy entertainment options” might include subsections like “Check news,” “Play audiobook,” “Play music,” and “Play podcasts.” Each is accompanied by a descriptive icon and can be expanded to reveal commands that launch Assistant immediately.

Other cards we’ve seen are for “Navigate and go” and “Catch up with friends and family.” A “See all in Explore” button at the bottom opens the full respective category in the Actions store.

We’ve spotted this new Google Assistant Explore card on several devices running the latest Google app beta over the past week. It should be more widely available today.