Tag Archives: actions on google

Designing for the Google Assistant on Smart Displays

Posted by Saba Zaidi, Senior Interaction Designer, Google Assistant

Earlier this year we announced Smart Displays, a new category of devices with the Google Assistant built in, that augment voice experiences with immersive visuals. These new, highly visual devices can make it easier to convey complex information, suggest Actions, support transactions, and express your brand. Starting today, Smart Displays are available for purchase in major US retailers, both in-store and online.

Interacting through voice is fast and easy, because speaking comes naturally to people, and language doesn't constrain people to predefined paths, unlike traditional visual interfaces. However in audio-only interfaces, it can be difficult to communicate detailed information like lists or tables, and nearly impossible to represent rich content like images, charts or a visual brand identity. Smart Displays allow you to create Actions for the Assistant that can respond to natural conversation, and also display information and represent your brand in an immersive, visual way.

Today we're announcing consumer availability of rich responses optimized for Smart Displays. With rich responses, developers can use basic cards, lists, tables, carousels and suggestion chips, which give you an array of visual interactions for your Action, with more visual components coming soon. In addition, developers can also create custom themes to more deeply customize your Action's look and feel.

If you've already built a voice-centric Action for the Google Assistant, not to worry, it'll work automatically on Smart Displays. But we highly recommend adding rich responses and custom themes to make your Action even more visually engaging and useful to your users on Smart Displays. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Consider using visual components instead of complex voice prompts

Smart Displays offer several visual formats for displaying information and facilitating user input. A carousel of images, a list or a table can help users scan information efficiently and then interact with a quick tap or swipe.

For example, consider a long, spoken prompt like: "Welcome to National Anthems! You can play the national anthems from 20 different countries, including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Which would you like to hear?"

Instead of merely showing the transcript of that whole spoken prompt on the screen, a carousel of country flags makes it easy for users to scroll and tap the anthem they want to hear.

2. Use visual suggestions to streamline the conversation

Suggestion chips are a great way to surface recommendations, aid feature discovery and keep the conversation moving on Smart Displays.

In this example, suggestion chips can help users find the "surprise me" feature, find the most popular anthems, or filter anthems by region.

3. Express your brand with themes

You can take advantage of new custom themes to differentiate your experience and represent your brand's persona, choosing a custom voice, background image or color, font style, or the shape of your cards to match your branding.

For example, an Action like California Surf Report, could be themed in a more immersive and customized way.

4. Check out our library of developer resources

We offer more tips on designing and building for Smart Displays and other visual devices in our conversation design site and in our talk from I/O about how to design Actions across devices.

Then head to our documentation to learn how to customize the visual appearance of your Actions with rich responses. You can also test and tinker with customizations for Smart Displays in the Actions Console simulator.

Don't forget that once you publish your first Action you can join our community program* and receive your exclusive Google Assistant t-shirt and up to $200 of monthly Google Cloud credit.

We can't wait to see—quite literally—what you build next! Thanks for being a part of our community, and as always, if you have ideas or requests that you'd like to share with our team, don't hesitate to join the conversation.

*Some countries are not eligible to participate in the developer community program, please review the terms and conditions

New Dialogflow features: how to use them to expand your Actions’ customer support capabilities

Posted by Mary Chen, Product Marketing Manager, and Ralfi Nahmias, Product Manager, Dialogflow

Today at Google Cloud Next '18, Dialogflow is introducing several new beta features to expand conversational capabilities for customer support and contact centers. Let's take a look at how three of these features can be used with the Google Assistant to improve the customer care experience for your Actions.

Create Actions smarter and faster with Knowledge Connectors Beta

Building conversational Actions for content-heavy use cases, such as FAQ or knowledge base answers, is difficult. Such content is often dense and unstructured, making accurate intent modeling time-consuming and prone to error. Dialogflow's Knowledge Connectors feature simplifies the development process by understanding and automatically curating questions and responses from the content you provide. It can add thousands of extracted responses directly to your conversational Action built with Dialogflow, giving you more time for the fun parts – building rich and engaging user experiences.

Try out Knowledge Connectors in this bike shop sample

Understand user texts better with Automatic Spelling Correction

When users interact with the Google Assistant through text, it's common and natural to make spelling and grammar mistakes. When mistypes occur, Actions may not understand the user's intent, resulting in a poor followup experience. With Dialogflow's Automatic Spelling Correction, Actions built with Dialogflow can automatically correct spelling mistakes, which significantly improves intent and entity matching. Automatic Spelling Correction uses similar technology to what's used in Google Search and other Google products.

Enable Automatic Spelling Correction to improve intent and entity matching

Assign a phone number to your Action with Phone Gateway Beta

Your Action can now be used as a virtual phone agent with Dialogflow's new Phone Gateway integration. Assign a working phone number to your Action built with Dialogflow, and it can start taking calls immediately. Phone Gateway allows you to easily implement virtual agents without needing to stitch together multiple services required for building phone applications.

Set up Phone Gateway in 3 easy steps

Dialogflow's Knowledge Connectors, Automatic Spelling Correction, and Phone Gateway are free for Standard Edition agents up to certain limits; for enterprise needs, see here for more options.

We look forward to the Actions you'll build with these new Dialogflow features. Give the features a try with the Cloud Next FAQ Action we made:

  • Download the Github sample
  • Say "Hey Google, talk to Next helper" on your Google Assistant-enabled device
  • Call +1 317-978-0364 (which uses Dialogflow's Phone Gateway)

And if you're new to developing for the Google Assistant, join our Cloud Next talk this Thursday at 9am – see you on the livestream or in person!

How creating an Action can complement your Android app

Posted by Neto Marin - Actions on Google Developer Advocate

There are millions of apps in the Android ecosystem, so helping yours get discovered can require some investment. Your app needs to offer something that differentiates it from other similar apps to stand out to users.

Building a companion Action is a fast and simple way to increase your Android app's potential reach by creating a new entrypoint from devices covered by the Google Assistant. This lets you bring your services to users without needing to install anything through voice, and can bring people into your app when it can provide more value.

Your companion Action complements your Android app's experience by offering some of your services through the Google Assistant, which is available on more than 500 million devices including speakers, phones, cars, headphones, and more. Creating an Action provides a frictionless way for users to start engaging with your services wherever the Google Assistant is available.

Creating an Action for the Assistant will extend your brand presence, bringing your services to new devices and contexts as users interact with the Google Assistant.

Feature what your app does better

It is probably a mistake to try to rewrite all of your Android app as a conversational Action, since voice is a different modality with different constraints and usage patterns. Instead, you should start by selecting the most important or popular features in your app that translate well into a voice context and can be more easily accomplished there. Then, you can create your conversational experience to offer these features on Google Assistant devices. Check out the Conversation design site, which has several articles and guides about how to create a great voice UI.

Let's take a look at a hypothetical example. Imagine you have a mobile commerce app. Some features include searching for products, navigating to different categories, adding payment information, and checking out. You could build an Action for the Assistant with most of the same functionality, but we encourage you to look for what makes the most sense in a conversational experience.

In this case, your Action could focus on everything that a user would want to know after they've purchased a product through your Android app or web page. You could offer a quick way to get updates about a purchase's status (if you provide different states for payment/purchase process) and shipment information, or provide an interface for re-ordering a user's favorite products. Then, your users would be able to ask something like, "Hey Google, ask Voice Store about my last purchase."

Or, to reach users who have never made a purchase before, you could create an Action to offer exciting deals for common products. For example, you could create an Action that is invoked with, "Hey Google, ask Voice Store what are the deals on TVs today".

As you can see, starting with a "hero" use case for your Action is an exciting way to introduce conversational features that complement your Android app, and it will take less time than you think.

At Google I/O 2018, we presented a talk, "Integrating your Android apps with the Google Assistant" which contains more details and examples for developers.

Delivering user's purchases across surfaces

In-app purchases, subscriptions, and one-time products have proven successful for Android developers when it comes to monetization, allowing developers to offer different kinds of digital goods and additional value for paying users. These types of monetization are proven to drive user conversion and make the app more profitable.

Google Play Billing offers a series of tools, APIs, and documentation to help developers manage the subscription life-cycle, build server-side validation, and much more. If you are new to in-app billing, check out the Google Play Billing Overview page.

Now, Android developers can expand where users can access these goods or upgraded experiences by offering them through Actions, as well. This expansion is accomplished by honoring the user's entitlements on Google Play across different surfaces and devices, reaching users when they can't (or don't want to) use an app, like while cooking or driving.

For non-Android platforms, you'll need to ask your users to link their accounts. You can then use your user's account history to identify what purchases they've made on other surfaces.

Check the Accessing Digital Purchases page for a step-by-step guide on how to enable access to the user's purchases and request and parse the purchase data.

What's next?

If you are not familiar with Actions on Google yet, start by checking out our overview page, which describes the platform in detail and tells you all you need to know to create your Actions for the Google Assistant.

Stay tuned for more posts about how to improve your Android app experience with Actions on Google.

Thanks for reading!

Building with Google Pay

Posted by Gerardo Capiel and Varouj Chitilian, Google Pay

Today's customers want to get things done faster than ever, whether they're ordering groceries or shopping for a new pair of shoes. With Google Pay, we want to ensure checkout doesn't slow them (or your conversions) down, while enhancing the customer experience at every step of the way.

Last week at Google I/O, we announced some exciting new features that do just that. We also shared the latest ways developers can use Google Pay to offer the best experiences at checkout and beyond—all available for free with our APIs. Here are some of the highlights and how you can make the most of them.

More places for customers to check out online

We've started rolling out support for checking out with Google Pay regardless of your browser or device. This means customers can pay with Google Pay on most major browsers from any device.

Enabling this functionality within your apps and sites is simple. Watch Google Pay software engineer Tony Chen do a website integration live on stage, then try it yourself using our developer docs.

But making checkout easier for your customers doesn't just apply to how they pay. Chrome Autofill helps customers fill in forms automatically, so they can speed through the entire checkout process without getting bogged down by typing. To ensure your shoppers are getting the fastest checkout experience with Chrome Autofill, we recommend you check out our new best practices guide.

We'll also be making it easier for customers to manage their payment methods in Google Pay by adding this functionality to our iOS and desktop experiences as well. The new functionality will allow people to add cards and see transactions whenever and wherever it's most convenient for them, giving you access to a new group of customers who will be able to use Google Pay within your apps and sites. It also means that customers who add cards from a laptop can use those cards with Google Pay on an iOS device. (Try it for yourself at g.co/pay/demo.)

This new functionality will be launching soon, and you can learn more about it in our Build with Google Pay session.

Mobile tickets and passes with the Google Pay API for Passes

Building off our newly-launched support for prepaid transit passes, we're now also supporting a new way for you to save and manage passes through our Google Pay API for Passes. This lets you create mobile event tickets and boarding passes that your customers can save to the Google Pay Android app. We've piloted this feature with Southwest, Fortress GB, and Ticketmaster, with more partners coming soon. Want to get on board? Sign up for more information.

Transactions come to Actions on Google

Actions on Google lets developers engage billions of users across the Google Assistant and soon Google Search, Android, and other surfaces by developing Actions and linking them with our ever-growing intents catalog. One of our sessions shows you how you can enable Google Pay in your Actions so your customers can make purchases with their Assistant across multiple surfaces, including mobile devices, Google Home, and soon, Smart Displays. Transactions are now available in Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. (We'll be bringing them to Brazil, India, Italy, and Spain soon.)

Plus, we're starting a developer preview where you can now enable transactions to sell digital content on the Google Assistant. That includes in-app purchases, subscriptions, games, experiences, and premium content.

We can't wait to see all of the creative ways you use Google Pay to amplify your business and build better checkout experiences for your customers. Be sure to check out all of our I/O sessions for more ideas, tools, and tips. In the meantime, we'll be hard at work on new features to keep making Google Pay the best experience possible—for you and your customers.

Wear OS by Google: AoG support and new enhanced battery saver mode

Posted by Hoi Lam, Lead Developer Advocate, Wear OS by Google

At Google I/O, we launched the Wear OS by Google developer preview 2. This update added support for Actions on Google (AoG) and more power-related enhancements including a new battery saver mode.

This developer preview includes updated Android Emulator images and a downloadable system image for the Huawei Watch 2 Bluetooth or Huawei Watch 2 Classic Bluetooth. This preview release is intended for developers only and not for daily or consumer use. Therefore, the preview release is only available via manual download and flash. Please refer to the release notes for known issues before downloading and flashing your device.

Support for Actions on Google

We have revamped the Google Assistant on Wear OS to support features such as visual cards, follow-on suggestion chips, and text-to-speech. For developers, we added support for Actions on Google to Wear OS and existing Actions will work on Wear OS out of the box. Be sure to observe best practices for Actions on Google to get the best results such as short concise dialog and adopting to both visual and vocal feedback. This feature does not depend on Android P and is being rolled out to all Wear 2.0 users.

Enhanced battery saver mode

In this Android P developer preview, we are launching an enhanced battery saver mode. While the watch is in this mode, the watch shows a power-efficient watch face and turns off a set of services including radios, the touch screen, and tilt to wake. Users can get the time by pressing the side button. A long press allows the user to switch back to a fully-operational mode and perform tasks such as paying with NFC or replying to a message. Developers should assume that their apps, watch faces, and complication data providers are not available in enhanced battery saver mode.

Update on power saving features

We received much feedback on the power saving features in the last developer preview. As a result, we have updates on two features:

  • Roll back of Wi-Fi off when BT is disconnected: To improve power consumption, the last developer preview would not connect to Wi-Fi when disconnected from Bluetooth. After listening carefully to user and developer feedback, we decided to roll back this change.
  • Limited background activity and foreground service: A number of health and fitness developers have said their apps require background monitoring of the user's motion and other vitals throughout the day. The developers said their apps cannot perform background monitoring if background services are unable to set alarms and jobs. For these types of exceptional use cases, we recommend that the apps use foreground services to anchor alarms and jobs. For other use-cases, developer should look at both foreground service as well as limiting jobs and alarms to while the watch is on charger. We are still fine tuning this feature, your feedback and use-cases will be most helpful in helping us get this right.

Smart Reply for bridged notifications

Smart Reply has been enabled for bridged notifications from the user's smartphone for some time. With the latest developer preview, we are introducing simplified Chinese support for our users in China. This feature is powered by an on-device model using TensorFlow Lite and the model is optimized for low-memory, low-power devices.

To use this feature, developers should set setAllowGeneratedReplies of the reply action to true. Here's a sample code snippet with the important part highlighted in bold: 

NotificationCompat.Action action =
    new NotificationCompat.Action.Builder(R.drawable.ic_reply_white_24dp,
        replyLabel, replyPendingIntent)
        .addRemoteInput(remoteInput)
        .setAllowGeneratedReplies(true) // <--- true to enable smart replies
        // Wear OS requires a hint to display the reply action inline.
        .extend(new NotificationCompat.Action.WearableExtender()
            .setHintDisplayActionInline(true))
        .build();

In addition, for messaging apps, we recommend that developers use MessagingStyle notifications. This can give the algorithm a more structured data set on which to base its recommendations.

Please give us your feedback

We expect to provide more updates to this preview before the final production release. Please submit any bugs you find via the Wear OS by Google issue tracker. The earlier you submit them, the higher the likelihood that we can include the fixes in the final release.

New conversation design resources for Actions on Google developers

Posted by April Pufahl, Conversation Designer

Creating Actions for the Google Assistant requires a breadth of design expertise ranging from voice user interface design, interaction design, visual design, motion design, and UX writing that we've refined into a single discipline: conversation design.

Today, we're launching a conversation design site that shares this expertise with you, so you can design Actions using the same principles that guide our teams at Google. Our goals are to help you:

  • Craft conversations that are natural and intuitive for users
  • Scale your conversations across all devices to help users wherever they are

If you're new to conversation design, you'll learn the basics of the conversation design process and how to determine whether conversation is right for your Action. You'll also get practical tips on how to:

  • Gather requirements
  • Create system and user personas
  • Write sample dialogs
  • Draw high level flows
  • Test and iterate
  • Design for the ways a conversation can deviate from the most common paths by adding handling for errors and other scenarios
  • Make sure your feature works as a voice only and a multimodal interaction

Finally, we've broken down the conversational and visual components that are used to compose your Actions' responses to the user.

By following our conversation design principles, you'll adapt to the communication system users learned first and know best, and in the process, build better Actions.

Follow us on Twitter @ActionsOnGoogle and join our G+ community https://g.co/actionsdev to keep up to date with more news from our team.

Join the “Build Actions for Your Community” Event Series

Posted by Ido Green, Developer Advocate

Ever wanted to learn about developing for the Google Assistant and meet other developers that are passionate about conversational UI? Well, we've got some good news!

Today, we are launching a global series of events about Actions on Google, run by Google Developers Groups (GDG) and other community groups. In these events, you'll be able to meet other developers and go together through educational content, uniquely crafted for these events by Google engineers. This includes tutorials on how to build your first Action and advanced sessions on how to use more complex features of the platform. By the end of the event you attend, you'll be able to build an Action for your community - be it your hometown, your professional network, or interest group.

And if you don't see an event near you, don't worry - you can always organize your own. We'll help!

It's going to be a great year for Actions developers. Please join us and check out the dedicated event website with all the event details and more information: developers.google.com/events/buildactions!

New creative ways to build with Actions on Google

Posted by Brad Abrams, Group Product Manager, & Chris Ramsdale, Product Manager

Though it's been just a few short weeks since we released a new set of features for Actions on Google, we're kicking off our presence at South by Southwest (SXSW) with a few more updates for you.

SXSW brings together creatives interested in fusing marketing and technology together, and what better way to start the festival than with new features that enable you to be more creative, and to build new type of Actions that help your users get more things done.

Support for media playback and better content carousels

This past year, we've heard from many developers who want to offer great media experiences as part of their Actions. While you can already make your podcasts discoverable to Assistant users, our new media response API allows you to develop deeper, more-engaging audio-focused conversational Actions that include, for example, clips from TV shows, interactive stories, meditation, relaxing sounds, and news briefings.

Your users can control this audio playback on voice-activated speakers like Google Home, Android phones, and more devices coming soon. On Android phones, they can even use the controls on their phone's notification area and lock screen.

Some developers who are already using our new media response API include The Daily Show, Calm, and CNBC.

To get started using our media response API, head over to our documentation to learn more.

And if your content is more visual than audio-based, we're also introducing a browse carousel for your Actions that allows you to show browsable content -- e.g., products, recipes, places -- with a visual experience that users can simply scroll through, left to right. See an example of how this would look to your users, below, then learn more about our browse carousel here.

Daily updates and push notifications on phones, now available to your users

While having a great user experience is important, we also want to ensure you have the right tools to re-engage your users so they keep coming back to the experience you've built. To that end, a few months ago, we introduced daily updates and push notifications as a developer preview.

Starting today, your users will have access to this feature. Esquire is already using it to send daily "wisdom tips", Forbes sends a quote of the day, and SpeedyBit sends daily updates of cryptocurrency prices to keep them in the know on market fluctuations.

As soon as you submit your Action for review with daily updates or push notifications enabled, and it's approved, your users will be able to opt into this re-engagement channel. Learn more in our docs.

Build connected experiences on Google Assistant for the paying users of your Android app

Actions for Google now allows you to access digital purchases (including paid app purchases, in-app purchases, and in-app subscriptions) that your users make from your Android app. By doing so, you can recognize when you're interacting with a user who's paid for a premium experience on your Android app, and similarly serve that experience in your Action, across devices.

And the best part? This is all done behind the scenes, so the user doesn't need to take any additional steps, like signing in, for you to provide this experience. Economist Espresso, for example, now knows when a user has already paid for a subscription with Google Play, and then offers an upgraded experience to the same user through their Action.

A new way to extend an embedded Google Assistant

In December of last year we announced the addition of Built-in Device Actions to the Google Assistant SDK for devices. This feature allows developers to extend any Google Assistant that is embedded in their device using traits and grammars that are maintained by Google and are largely focused on home automation. For example "turn on", "turn off" and "turn the temperature down".

Today we're announcing the addition of Custom Device Actions which are more flexible Device Actions, allowing developers to specify any grammar and command to be executed by their device. Once you build these Custom Device Actions, users will be able to activate specific capabilities through the Google Assistant. This leads to more natural ways in which users interact with their Assistant-enabled devices, including the ability to utilize more specific device capabilities.

Before:

"Ok Google, turn on the oven"

"Ok, turning on the oven"

After:

"Ok Google, set the oven to convection and preheat to 350 degrees"

"Ok, setting the oven to convection and preheating to 350 degrees"

To give you a sense of how this might work in the real world, check out a prototype, Talk to the Light from the talented Red Paper Heart team, that shows a zany use of this functionality. Then, check out our documentation to learn more about how you can start building these for your devices. We've provided a technical case study from Red Paper Heart and their code repository in case you want to see how they built it.

In addition to Custom Device Actions, we've also integrated device registration into the Actions on Google console, allowing developers to get up and running more quickly. To get started checkout the latest documentation and console.

A few creative explorations to inspire you

Similarly, we teamed up with a few cutting-edge teams to explore the creative potential of the Actions on Google platform. Following the Voice experiments the Google Creative Lab released a few months ago, these teams released four new experiments:

The code for all of these Actions is open source and is accompanied by in-depth technical case studies from each team that shares their learnings when developing Actions.

Case studies of Actions, built with Dialogflow

Ready to build? Take a look at our three new case studies with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Domino's, and Ticketmaster. Learn about their development journey with Dialogflow and how the Actions they built help them stay ahead of the conversational technology curve, be where their customers are, and assist throughout the entire user journey:

We hope these updates get your creative juices flowing and inspire you to build even more Actions and embed the Google Assistant on more devices. Don't forget that once you publish your first Action you can join our community program* and receive your exclusive Google Assistant t-shirt and up to $200 of monthly Google Cloud credit. Thanks for being a part of our community, and as always, if you have ideas or requests that you'd like to share with our team, don't hesitate to join the conversation.

*Some countries are not eligible to participate in the developer community program, please review the terms and conditions

Actions on Google now supports 16 languages, android app integration and better geo capabilities

Posted by Brad Abrams, Product Manager

While Actions on the Google Assistant are available to users on more than 400 million devices, we're focused on expanding the availability of the developer platform even further. At Mobile World Congress, we're sharing some good news for our international developer community.

Starting today, you can build Actions for the Google Assistant in seven new languages:

  • Hindi
  • Thai
  • Indonesian
  • Danish
  • Norwegian
  • Swedish
  • Dutch

These new additions join English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and Russian. That brings our total count of supported languages to 16! You can develop for all of them using Dialogflow and its natural language processing capabilities, or directly with the Actions SDK. And we're not stopping here–expect more languages to be added later this year.

If you localize your apps in these new languages you won't just be among the first Actions available in the new locales, you'll also earn rewards while you do it! And if you're new to Actions on Google, check out our community program* to learn how you can snag an exclusive Google Assistant t-shirt and up to $200 of monthly Google Cloud credit by publishing your first Action. Already we've seen partners take advantage of other languages we've launched in the past like Bring!, which is now available in both English and German.

New updates to make it easier to build for global audiences

Besides supporting new languages, we're also making it easier to build your Action for global audiences. First, we recently added support for building with templates—creating an Action by filling in a Google Sheet without a single line of code—for French, German, and Japanese. For example, TF1 built Téléfoot, using templates in French to create an engaging World Cup-themed trivia game with famous commentators included as sound effects.

Additionally, we've made it a little easier for you to localize your Actions into different languages by enabling you to export your directory listing information as a file. With the file in hand, you can translate offline and upload the translations to your console, making localization quicker and more organized.

But before you run off and start building Actions in new languages, take a quick tour of some of the useful developer features rolling out this week…

Link to your Android app to help users get things done from their mobile devices

By the end of the year the Assistant will reach 95 percent of all eligible Android phones worldwide, and Actions are a great way for you to reach those users to help them get things done easily over voice. Sometimes, however, users may benefit from the versatility of your Android app for particularly complex or highly interactive tasks.

So today, we're introducing a new feature that lets you deep link from your Actions in the Google Assistant to a specific intent in your Android app. Here's an example of SpotHero linking from their Action to their Android app after a user purchased a parking reservation. The Android app allows the user to see more details about the reservation or redeem their spot.

As you integrate these links in your Action, you'll make it easier for your users to find what they're looking for and to move seamlessly to your Android app to complete their user journey. This new feature will roll out over the coming weeks, but you can check out our developer documentation for more information on how to get started.

A faster, easier way to help with location queries

We're also introducing askForPlace, a new conversation helper that integrates the Google Places API to enable developers to use the Google Assistant to understand location-based user queries mid-conversation.

Using the new helper, the Assistant leverages Google Maps' location and points of interest (POI) expertise to provide fast, accurate places for all your users' location queries. Once the location details have been sorted out with the user, the Assistant returns the conversation back to your Action so the user can finish the interaction.

So whether your business specializes in delivering a beautiful bouquet of flowers or a piping hot pepperoni pizza, you no longer need to spend time designing models for gathering users' location requests, instead you can focus on your Action's core experience.

Let's take a look at an example of how Uber uses the askForPlace helper to help their users book a ride:

We joined halfway through the interaction above, but it's worth pointing out that once the Uber action asked the user "Where would you like to go?" the developer triggered the askForPlace helper to handle location disambiguation. The user is still speaking with Uber, but the Assistant handled all user inputs on the back end until a drop-off location was resolved. From there, Uber was able to wrap up the interaction and dispatch a driver.


Head over to the askForPlace docs to learn how to create a better user experience for your customers.

Fewer introductions for returning users

And to wrap up our new feature announcements, today we're introducing an improved experience for users who use your app regularly—without any work required on your end. Specifically, if users consistently come back to your app, we'll cut back on the introductory lead-in to get users into your Actions as quickly as possible.

Today's updates are part of our commitment to improving the platform for developers, and making the Google Assistant and Actions on Google more widely available around the globe. If you have ideas or requests that you'd like to share with our team, don't hesitate to join the conversation.

*Some countries are not eligible to participate in the developer community program, please review the terms and conditions

Actions On Google Best Practices Video Series

Posted by Ido Green (@greenido), Developer Advocate

We recently launched a new YouTube video series focused on teaching developers best practices for the Actions on Google platform.

Apps for the Google Assistant are the gateway for users to engage with your services through Google Home, Android phones, iPhones, and in the future, through every experience where the Google Assistant is available.

The goal of the video series is to show you how to use the Google Assistant platform in the best way. You will learn more from Ido Green, Developer Advocate at Google, who will touch on topics like:

Tune in to learn how to build, or improve your apps for the Google Assistant so your users can benefit from more meaningful, interactive experiences.

And if you'd like to keep the conversation going, please join our developer community at: https://g.co/actionsdev or @actionsongoogle

See you!