Google Assistant
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Google Assistant comes to gaze-powered accessible devices
People who rely on gaze-tracking to interact with their devices on an everyday basis now have a powerful new tool in their arsenal: Google Assistant. Substituting gaze for its original voice-based interface, the Assistant’s multiple integrations and communication tools should improve the capabilities of the Tobii Dynavox devices it now works on.
Assistant will now be possible to add as a tile on Tobii’s eye-tracking tablets and mobile apps, which present a large customizable grid of commonly used items that the user can look at to activate. It acts as an intermediary with a large collection of other software and hardware interfaces that Google supports.
For instance, smart home appliances — which can be incredibly useful for people with certain disabilities — may not have an easily accessible interface for the gaze-tracking device, necessitating other means or perhaps limiting what actions a user can take. Google Assistant works with tons of that stuff out of the box.
“Being able to control the things around you and ‘the world’ is central to many of our users,” said Tobii Dynavox’s CEO, Fredrik Ruben. “The Google assistant ecosystem provides almost endless possibilities — and provides a lot of normalcy to our community of users.”
Users will be able to set up Assistant tiles for commands or apps, and automate inquiries like “what’s on my calendar today?” The setup process just requires a Google account, and then the gaze-tracking device (in this case Tobii Dynavox’s mystifyingly named Snap Core First app) has to be added to the Google Home app as a smart speaker/display. Then Assistant tiles can be added to the interface and customized with whatever commands would ordinarily be spoken.
Image Credits: Google / Tobii Dynavox
Ruben said the integration of Google’s software was “technically straightforward.” “Because our software itself is already built to support a wide variety of access needs and is set up to accommodate launching third-party services, there was a natural fit between our software and Google Assistant’s services,” he explained.
Tobii’s built-in library of icons (things like lights with an up arrow, a door being opened or closed and other visual representations of actions) can also be applied easily to the Assistant shortcuts.
For Google’s part, this is just the latest in a series of interesting accessibility services the company has developed, including live transcription, detection when sign language is being used in group video calls and speech recognition that accommodates non-standard voices and people with impediments. Much of the web is not remotely accessible but at least the major tech companies put in some good work now and then to help.
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Android’s Ambient Mode will soon come to ‘select devices’
You’ve probably heard murmurs about Google’s forthcoming Ambient Mode for Android . The company first announced this feature, which essentially turns an Android device into a smart display while it’s charging, in September. Now, in a Twitter post, Google confirmed that it will launch soon, starting with a number of select devices that run Android 8.0 or later.
At the time, Google said Ambient Mode was coming to the Lenovo Smart Tab M8 HD and Smart Tab tablets, as well as the Nokia 7.2 and 6.2 phones. According to the Verge, it’ll also come to Sony, Nokia, Transsion and Xiaomi phones, though Google’s own Pixels aren’t on the company’s list yet.
While your
charges, Ambient Mode comes to life. Hear how it delivers a proactive Google Assistant experience to your #Android phone. pic.twitter.com/67rrgTTxqO
— Android (@Android) November 25, 2019
“The ultimate goal for proactive Assistant is to help you get things done faster, anticipate your needs and accomplish your tasks as quickly and as easily as possible,” said Google Assistant product manager Arvind Chandrababu in the announcement. “It’s fundamentally about moving from an app-based way of doing things to an intent-based way of doing things. Right now, users can do most things with their smartphones, but it requires quite a bit of mental bandwidth to figure out, hey, I need to accomplish this task, so let me backtrack and figure out all the steps that I need to do in order to get there.”
Those are pretty lofty goals. In practice, what this means, for now, is that you will be able to set an alarm with just a few taps from the ambient screen, see your upcoming appointments, turn off your connected lights and see a slideshow of your images in the background. I don’t think that any of those tasks really consumed a lot of mental bandwidth in the first place, but Google says it has more proactive experiences planned for the future.
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Google Assistant introduces personalized playlists of audio news
Starting today, when you say “Hey Google, play me the news” to a Google Assistant-enabled phone or smart speaker, you’ll get a tailored playlist of the day’s big headlines and stories.
That’s probably what many of us are hoping for when we listen to a news radio station or a daily news podcast during the morning commute. But those come from a single broadcaster, and may require you to hop around to get all the news you’re looking for.
In contrast, the feature that Google is calling Your News Update draws stories from a variety of publisher partners, focusing on the ones that seem relevant to your interests and your location.
“Audio has always been great,” said Audio News Product Manager Liz Gannes (a former tech journalist herself.) “It’s a tremendously evocative medium that conveys an immense amount of information.”
But she suggested that “the distribution technology has been slower [t evolve] than things like text and video,” which is why Google has been experimenting in this area. For example, it’s already added news stories to Google Assistant, as well as responses to news-related questions like “What’s the latest news about Brexit?”
Gannes added that behind the scenes, the company has been developing “an open specification for single topic audio stories.” So rather than dealing with an unwieldy hourlong broadcast or podcast, Google Assistant is working clips focused on a specific piece of news.
Your News Update usually starts with a few brief, general interest clips — namely, the big headlines of the day. Then it starts playing longer stories that are selected based on what Google knows about you.
For example, when I tried it out this morning, my update began with a 30-second update on the impeachment from Fox News (not one of my regular news sources) and ran through other then major stories of the day, then switched to longer (two- to three-minute) entertainment stories from sources like The Hollywood Reporter.
Gannes noted that “there’s a big emphasis on local news in this product — that don’t just mean where you live, but also other locations you care about.” And she said the average update will be around an hour and a half — so it can keep you occupied during a long commute, no dial-fiddling required.
John Ciancutti, Google’s director of engineering for search, added that the recommendations should get smarter over time: “If you want to skip a story … the more you listen, the better sense we get of your tastes and interests.” He also suggested that Your News Update could become more sensitive to context, offering different stories depending on whether (say) you’re in your car or in your kitchen.
“You can imagine in the future, you tune in and we know you’re in your car on Tuesday morning at 7:36, and we can predict based on other listening that you’ve got about a 28-minute commute,” Ciancutti said.
Your News Update is currently available in English in the United States, with plans for international expansion next year.
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Google announces Action Blocks, a new accessibility tool for creating mobile shortcuts
Google today announced Action Blocks, a new accessibility tool that allows you to create shortcuts for common multi-step tasks with the help of the Google Assistant. In that respect, Action Blocks isn’t all that different from Shortcuts on iOS, for example, but Google is specifically looking at this as an accessibility feature for people with cognitive disabilities.
“If you’ve booked a rideshare using your phone recently, you’ve probably had to go through several steps: unlock your phone, find the right app, navigate through its screens, select appropriate options, and enter your address into the input box,” writes Google accessibility software engineer Ajit Narayanan. “At each step, the app assumes that you’re able to read and write, find things by trial-and-error, remember your selections, and focus for a sustained period of time.”
Google’s own research shows that 80% of people with severe cognitive disabilities, like advanced dementia, autism or Down syndrome, don’t use smartphones, in part because of these barriers.
Action Blocks are essentially a sequence of commands for the Google Assistant, so everything the Assistant can do can be scripted using this new tool, no matter whether that’s starting a call or playing a TV show. Once the Action Block is set up, you can create a shortcut with a custom image on your phone’s home screen.
For now, the only way to get access to Action Blocks is to join Google’s trusted tester program. It’s unclear when this will roll out to a wider audience. When it does, though, I’m sure a variety of users will want to use of this feature.
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The Google Assistant can now control your Xbox One
It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft was betting heavily on its Cortana digital assistant. That’s a bet that didn’t pay off. But because this is the new Microsoft, the company is instead betting on integrating its products with those services that its users do actually use. Today, the company announced that you will now be able to control your Xbox One from the Google Assistant. For now, this feature is in beta, but you can expect a full launch later this fall.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean the Google Assistant is now available on your Xbox One and you can’t ask it for the weather. What it does mean is that you’ll be able to ask the Assistant to launch games on the Xbox, pause them, turn up the volume, etc. (“Hey Google, turn off Xbox.”).
You can find a full list of supported commands here.
This will work with virtually every Assistant-enabled device, including your iOS and Android phones. To get started, set up the Xbox like any other third-party Assistant device in the Google Home app on Android or iOS — and that’s essentially what the Xbox One then becomes in the Assistant ecosystem: just another device you can control with it.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft, which has basically given up on Cortana for the consumer market, is also working with Amazon to bring Alexa to your PC. Microsoft doesn’t really care what you use to control your Microsoft devices, as long as you use a Microsoft or Windows 10 device. Now it’s probably just a matter of time before you can control your PC with the Assistant — or even get full Assistant support in Windows 10.
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Next-generation Google Assistant is coming to new Pixel phones this year
A next-generation Google Assistant that can handle more complex tasks across apps — quickly switching from hailing a ride, to checking the weather, to taking a selfie — is coming to new Pixel phones later this year.
An early demonstration of the more robust Google Assistant was shown Tuesday at Google I/O 2019, the company’s annual developer conference.
A key feature is that users will no longer have to exclaim “Hey Google” for every question or task. Instead, a user can make a variety of requests after the initial “Hey Google” wake command.
During the demo, a Google employee onstage was able to use the voice assistant to craft a text message, quickly search photos of a trip, filter further to find animal photos, then add the image and send the message. In a subsequent task, the user verbally asked for flight information, added to the text and sent.
The next-gen Google Assistant will be able to compose and send emails, as well.
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The Google Assistant on Android gets more visual responses
About half a year ago, Google gave the Assistant on phones a major visual refresh. Today, the company is following up with a couple of small but welcome tweaks that’ll see the Assistant on Android provide more and better visual responses that are more aligned with what users already expect to see from other Google services.
That means when you ask for events now, for example, the response will look exactly like what you’d see if you tried the same query from your mobile browser. Until now, Google showed a somewhat pared-down version in the Assistant.
Also — and this is going to be a bit of a controversial change — when the Assistant decides that the best answer is simply a list of websites (or when it falls back to those results because it simply doesn’t have any other answer), the Assistant used to show you a couple of boxes in a vertical layout that were not exactly user-friendly. Now, the Assistant will simply show the standard Google Search layout.
Seems like a good idea, so why would that be controversial? Together with the search results, Google will also show its usual Search ads. This marks the first time that Google is showing ads in the Assistant experience. To be fair, the Assistant will only show these kinds of results for a very small number of queries, but users will likely worry that Google will bring more ads to the rest of the Assistant.
Google tells me that advertisers can’t target their ads to Assistant users and won’t get any additional information about them.
The Assistant will now also show built-in mortgage calculators, color pickers, a tip calculator and a bubble level when you ask for those. Also, when you ask for a stock quote, you’ll now see a full interactive graph, not just the current price of the quote.
These new features are rolling out to Android phones in the U.S. now. As usual, it may take a bit before you see them pop up on your own phone.
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Google Assistant gets expanded language and device support
At MWC Barcelona, Google today made a few announcements around its Assistant. A lot of these center around support for KaiOS, the operating system for low-end feature phones that Google invested in last year, and additional language support.
While KaiOS, which was born out of Mozilla’s failed FirefoxOS project, may be for the very low end of low-end phones, Google argues that it’s exactly these devices that can profit from have access to a voice-driven assistant, given that they often have smaller screens, too, that make typing a hassle. Google is now bringing the Assistant to these KaiOS devices for users in India, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. In addition, it’s also bringing Voice Typing to KaiOS to help user enter text using their voice. With this, KaiOS users can simply speak their queries and use the Assistant as a way to input all kinds of information.
“If you look at the emerging markets, we’ve seen that the number of Assistant users has multiplied by seven,” Google’s Behshad Behzadi said. “The main reason for this is that for the new users which are coming to this technology for the first time, voice is really the easiest and most natural way for them to use their phones. It’s removing a technology barrier for these users.”
With today’s launch, Google is also bringing support for its bilingual Assistant to more languages. This allows you to seamlessly switch between two languages. Until now, this only worked for English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian. Today, the company is adding Korean, Hindi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch to this lineup.
In addition, the Assistant now speaks eight new Indic languages: Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu.
Besides the new languages, Google is also bringing Actions — Google’s version of what Amazon calls skills in the Alex ecosystem — to Android Go and KaiOS. Developers can build these actions in 19 languages across 29 locales now.
Google also quietly launched a few other new Assistant features today. You can now check in to your Lufthansa, Swiss or Austrian Air flights within Europe using your voice, for example. The Assistant on your phone can now also control the Digital Wellbeing settings like your wind-down time and ‘do not disturb’ mode (in English, German and French). And if you speak German or French, then multiple actions — which allow you to tell the Assistant to perform more than one action at a time (“What’s the weather like in Munich and Bordeaux?”) — are now available to you, too. Until now, this feature was only available in English.
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Google Assistant iOS update lets you say ’Hey Siri, OK Google’
Apple probably didn’t intend to let competitors take advantage of Siri Shortcuts this way, but you can now launch Google Assistant on your iPhone by saying “Hey Siri, OK Google .”
But don’t expect a flawless experience — it takes multiple steps. After updating the Google Assistant app on iOS, you need to open the app to set up a new Siri Shortcut for Google Assistant.
As the name suggests, Siri Shortcuts lets you record custom phrases to launch specific apps or features. For instance, you can create Siri Shortcuts to play your favorite playlist, launch directions to a specific place, text someone and more. If you want to chain multiple actions together, you can even create complicated algorithms using Apple’s Shortcuts app.
By default, Google suggests the phrase “OK Google.” You can choose something shorter, or “Hey Google,” for instance. After setting that up, you can summon Siri and use this custom phrase to launch Google’s app.
You may need to unlock your iPhone or iPad to let iOS open the app. The Google Assistant app then automatically listens to your query. Again, you need to pause and wait for the app to appear before saying your query.
This is quite a cumbersome walk-around and I’m not sure many people are going to use it. But the fact that “Hey Siri, OK Google” exists is still very funny.
On another note, Google Assistant is still the worst when it comes to your privacy. The app pushes you to enable “web & app activity,” the infamous all-encompassing privacy destroyer. If you activate that setting, Google will collect your search history, your Chrome browsing history, your location, your credit card purchases and more.
It’s a great example of dark pattern design. If you haven’t enabled web & app activity, there’s a flashy blue banner at the bottom of the app that tells you that you can “unlock more Assistant features.”
When you tap it, you get a cute little animated drawing to distract you from the text. There’s only one button, which says “More,” If you tap it, the “More” button becomes “Turn on” — many people are not even going to see “No thanks” on the bottom left.
It’s a classic persuasion method. If somebody asks you multiple questions and you say yes every time, you’ll tend to say yes to the last question even if you don’t agree with it. You tapped on “Get started” and “More” so you want to tap on the same button one more time. If you say no, Google asks you one more time if you’re 100 percent sure.
So make sure you read everything and you understand that you’re making a privacy trade-off by using Google Assistant.
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The Google Assistant gets more visual
Google today is launching a major visual redesign of its Assistant experience on phones. While the original vision of the Assistant focused mostly on voice, half of all interactions with the Assistant actually include touch. So with this redesign, Google acknowledges that and brings more and larger visuals to the Assistant experience.
If you’ve used one of the recent crop of Assistant-enabled smart displays, then some of what’s new here may look familiar. You now get controls and sliders to manage your smart home devices, for example. Those include sliders to dim your lights and buttons to turn them on or off. There also are controls for managing the volume of your speakers. Update: Google tells me that update will roll out over the course of the next few weeks, with the iOS release depending on Apple’s app store review process.
Even in cases where the Assistant already offered visual feedback — say when you ask for the weather — the team has now also redesigned those results and brought them more in line with what users are already seeing on smart displays from the likes of Lenovo and LG. On the phone, though, that experience still feels a bit more pared down than on those larger displays.
With this redesign, which is going live on both Android and in the iOS app today, Google is also bringing a little bit more of the much-missed Google Now experience back to the phone. While you could already bring up a list of upcoming appointments, commute info, recent orders and other information about your day from the Assistant, that feature was hidden behind a rather odd icon that many users surely ignored. Now, after you’ve long-pressed the home button on your Android phone, you can swipe up to get that same experience. I’m not sure that’s more discoverable than previously, but Google is saving you a tap.
In addition to the visual redesign of the Assistant, Google also today announced a number of new features for developers. Unsurprisingly, one part of this announcement focuses on allowing developers to build their own visual Assistant experiences. Google calls these “rich responses” and provides developers with a set of pre-made visual components that they can easily use to extend their Assistant actions. And because nothing is complete with GIFs, they can now use GIFs in their Assistant apps, too.
But in addition to these new options for creating more visual experiences, Google is also making it a bit easier for developers to take their users money.
While they could already sell physical goods through their Assistant actions, starting today, they’ll also be able to sell digital goods. Those can be one-time purchases for a new level in a game or recurring subscriptions. Headspace, which has long offered a very basic Assistant experience, now lets you sign up for subscriptions right from the Assistant on your phone, for example.
Selling digital goods directly in the Assistant is one thing, but that sale has to sync across different applications, too, so Google today is also launching a new sign-in service for the Assistant that allows developers to log in and link their accounts.
“In the past, account linking could be a frustrating experience for your users; having to manually type a username and password — or worse, create a new account — breaks the natural conversational flow,” the company explains. “With Google Sign-In, users can now create a new account with just a tap or confirmation through their voice. Most users can even link to their existing accounts with your service using their verified email address.”
Starbucks has already integrated this feature into its Assistant experience to give users access to their rewards account. Adding the new Sign-In for the Assistant has almost doubled its conversion rate.
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