Google Assistant

The annual South by Southwest music (and a lot more than music!) festival in Austin, Texas, kicks off this weekend, and as usual, Google is going to have pretty significant presence. This year, it looks like everything will revolve around Google Assistant.

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Following a number of Google Assistant announcements at MWC 2018, the company tonight highlighted its smart assistant at the Oscars. The rather long ad showcased a variety of use cases where Assistant would be helpful, while Nest also advertised its upcoming smart Hello doorbell.

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Google Home and various Assistant speakers are incredibly handy devices, and they offer a lot of incredibly cool features. Everyone has a favorite, so this week, I sat down with the rest of the team at 9to5Google to find out what their favorite features are…

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On Friday, Google announced that Assistant would gain multilingual support, more languages, and Routines throughout 2018. To aid developers with this expansion, the company is making it easier to bring Actions on Google abroad, while apps will be better able to integrate with Assistant.

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Rolling out earlier this week, version 7.22 of the Google app contained strings that detailed how users will be able to customize the search widget. We’ve now been able to activate that new interface, as well as a slightly new look for the Google Assistant and shed more light on “Google Temperature.”

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In addition to a bevy of Assistant news ahead of MWC 2018, Google Lens is also gaining a wider release and new features. Meanwhile, per a report yesterday, Google is also bringing ARCore out of beta today and touts 100 million supported devices.

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In addition to multilingual support, more languages, and deeper device integrations throughout 2018, Google Assistant is adding several features in the coming weeks. First announced at last year’s October 4th event, Routines will be available in the coming weeks, as well as setting location-based reminders from Google Home.

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As teased yesterday by Hiroshi Lockheimer’s MWC 2018 post, Google is heading into the mobile trade show with a number of Assistant announcements. With a focus on phone features, the smart Assistant will add more languages this year, as well as multilingual support. Meanwhile, Google has worked closely with OEMs to improve the Assistant experience on third-party devices.

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Google Assistant speakers are starting to take a serious hold in the market, and while Google Home Mini is largely to thank for that, third-party options are a big part of it as well. Now, Anker has its own smart speaker powered by Google Assistant in the Zolo Mojo, and it’s a healthy competitor to the Google Home Mini.

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We’ve slowly been learning more about Google’s upcoming Fuchsia OS, but given how different it is from Android, we can’t take anything for granted. It was easy to assume that Assistant would be back, but today we’ve gotten accidental confirmation from discussed changes to the source code.

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One of the features we were excited to see following Google I/O last year was Google Home visualizations on Chromecast. While it took a while to debut, Google finally launched that functionality in recent weeks, and now, it’s expanding even further.

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Nest is one of the best ways to add security to your home, whether that’s with video surveillance or sensors. Now, after being announced last year, an update is turning Nest’s best camera into a Google Assistant speaker.

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At its 2018 Digital News Initiative Summit today, Google announced that its Assistant is getting a massive expansion throughout 2018. The smart assistant and extension of Google Search will see a 2-3x increase in availability across language, countries, and locales compared to last year.

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We’re just a couple of months away from Google’s next big set of reveals at I/O 2018, and there’s a lot we’re expecting. For one, as has happened in the past several years, Google will likely be showing off the next version of Android, and now we’re getting some new details on what’s in store…

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Back at I/O 2017, Google showed off a lot of new features that would eventually be heading to speakers powered by the Assistant. However, as of late last year, a lot of those still weren’t enabled. Now, though, they seem to be slowly rolling out, and the latest is visual responses on connected TVs.

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In the last version two weeks ago, the Google app teased primary and secondary languages for Assistant, as well as revealing more about smart displays. An update rolling out today reveals that custom hotwords might be coming to Assistant. Meanwhile, version 7.20 also details more about bilingual support, offline podcast downloads, and more.
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Google Home, and Assistant speakers in general, have only been on the scene a fraction of the time that the Amazon Echo family has. However, Google’s devices are starting to pick up steam, and they’ve really made themselves known in the market…

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