Voice interaction has the potential to simplify the way we use technology. And with Dialogflow,Actions on Google, and Speech Synthesis API, it's becoming easier for any developer to create voice-based experiences. That's why we've created Voice Experiments, a site to showcase how developers are exploring voice interaction in all kinds of exciting new ways.
The site includes a few experiments that show how voice interaction can be used to explore music, gaming, storytelling, and more. MixLab makes it easier for anyone to create music, using simple voice commands. Mystery Animal puts a new spin on a classic game. And Story Speakerlets you create interactive, spoken stories by just writing in a Google Doc – no coding required.
You can try the experiments through the Google Assistant on your phone and on voice-activated speakers like the Google Home. Or you can try them on the web using a browser like Chrome.
It's still early days for voice interaction, and we're excited to see what you will make. Visit g.co/VoiceExperiments to play with the experiments or submit your own.
Last month we announcedthat UK users can access apps for the Google Assistant on Google Home and their phones—and starting today, we're bringing Actions on Google to Australia. From Perth to Sydney, developers can start building apps for the Google Assistant, giving their userseven more ways to get things done.
Similar to our launch in the UK, your English apps will appear in the local directory automatically. With that said, there are a few things to help make your app a true blue Aussie:
New TTS voices: There are a number of new TTS voices with an Australian (english) accent. We've automatically selected one for your app but you can change the selected voice or opt to use your current English US or UK voice by going to the actions console.
Practice makes perfect: We also recommend reviewing your response text strings andmaking adjustments to accommodate for differences between the languages, like making sure you know the important things, like candy should be lollies and servo is a gas station.
Our developer tools, documentationand simulatorhave all been updated to make it easy for you to create, test and deploy your app. So what are you waiting for?
UK and Aussie users are just the start, we'll continue to make the Actions on Google platform available in more languages over the coming year. If you have questions about internationalization, please reach out to us on Stackoverflowand Google+.
Starting today, we're making all your apps built for the Google Assistant available to our en-GB users across Google Home (recently launched in the UK), select Android phones and the iPhone.
While your apps will appear in the local directory automatically this week, to make your apps truly local, here are a couple of things you should do:
There are four new TTS voices with an en-GB accent. We've automatically selected one for your app but you can change the selected voice or opt to use your current en-US TTS voice by going to the actions console.
We also recommend reviewing all your response text strings and making adjustments to accommodate for differences between the two languages -- e.g., these pesky little Zeds. This will help make your app shine when accessed on the phone.
Apps like Akinator, Blinkist Minute and SongPophave already optimized their experience for en-GB Assistant users—and we can't wait to see who dives in next!
And for those of you who are excited about the ability to target Google Assistant users on eng-GB, now it is the perfect time to start building. Our developer tools, documentationand simulatorhave all been updated to make it easy for you to create, test and deploy your first app.
We'll continue to make the Actions on Google platform available in more languages over the coming year. If you have questions about internationalization, please reach out to us on Stackoverflowand Google+.
By Jason Titus, Vice President, Developer Product Group
It's great to be in our backyard again for Google I/O to connect with developers
around the world. The 7,200 attendees at Shoreline Amphitheatre, millions of
viewers on the livestream, and
thousand of developers at local I/O Extended events across 80+
countries heard about our efforts to make the lives of developers easier --
allowing them to focus on the problems they're trying to solve by minimizing the
pain points of building a product.
Earlier this morning, our CEO Sundar Pichai talked
about our various billion-user platforms. Whether it's Android or Chrome or the
mobile Web, our success would not have been possible without the developer
community. And during our Developer
Keynote, we covered our heavy investments in tools and services for
developers who build on our platforms every day.
We have a lot to cover over the next three days. Let's take a closer look at the
major developer news at I/O so far:
Platforms that connect developers to billions of users around the
world
Android
O Developer Preview 2 — Get a look at the next release of Android O focused
on fluid experiences that make Android even more useful, and our efforts to
optimize battery life, startup time, graphic rendering time, and stability.
Early adopters can opt in to the Android O Beta Program at android.com/beta and run Android O now.
Project
Treble — Last week, we also introduced a new Android framework designed to
help reduce the time and effort it takes device makers to upgrade a phone to a
new version of Android, starting with Android O.
Android
Go — We're optimizing Android to run smoothly on entry-level devices,
starting with the O release. We're also designing Google apps to use less
memory, storage space, and mobile data, including apps such as YouTube Go,
Chrome, and Gboard.
Kotlin
— Android is officially supporting the Kotlin programming language, in addition
to the Java language and C++. Kotlin is a brilliantly designed, mature,
production-ready language that we believe will make Android development faster
and more fun.
Android
Studio 3.0 Canary — Our new preview includes three major features to
accelerate development flow: a new suite of app performance profiling tools to
quickly diagnose performance issues, support for the Kotlin programming
language, and increased Gradle build speeds for large sized app projects.
Mobile Web — AMP and Progressive Web
Apps(PWAs) are re-defining
modern mobile web development. AMP gets content in front of users fast and PWAs
deliver app-focused experiences that are reliable, fast and engaging. We're
seeing success stories
from all around the world - travel company Wego has rolled out a
successful AMP based PWA and Forbes has seen user
engagement double since launching a PWA. If you're wondering how good your
current web experience is, you can use Lighthouse - an
automated tool for measuring web-page quality. Be sure to tune in this afternoon
for the
Mobile Web: State of the Union talk to hear more about building rich mobile
web experiences.
Infrastructure and services to take mobile apps and the Web to the
next level
Firebase
— At last year's I/O, we expanded Firebase to a full mobile development platform
with products to help you build your app and grow your business. Over a million
developers now use Firebase, and we're doubling down on our efforts to simplify
more every-day developer challenges. We're giving more insights to understand
app performance through Firebase Performance Monitoring, introducing integration
between Hosting and Cloud Functions, adding support for Phone Number
Authentication, and continuing to improve Analytics in a number of ways. We've
also started open
sourcing our SDKs.
Powerful tools to acquire and engage new users; grow successful
businesses
Google
Play Console — We announced several powerful, new features and reports in
the Play Console to help developers improve their app's performance, manage
releases with confidence, reach a global audience, and grow their business. The
Play Console also has a new name, to reflect its broadened business uses, and a
fresh look to make it easier to get things done.
Android
Instant Apps — We opened Android Instant Apps, a new way to run Android apps
without requiring installation, to all
developers. Now anyone can build and publish an instant app. There are also
more than 50 new experiences available for users to try out from a variety of
brands, such as Jet, New York Times, Vimeo and Zillow.
Payments, Monetization & Ads — We introduced a Google Payment API that
enables developers to give their customers the ability to pay in apps and online
with credit or debit cards saved to their Google Account. New AdMob integration
with Google Analytics for Firebase helps them monetize efficiently and updates
to Universal Apps Campaigns will help them grow their user base.
New interfaces to push the limits of what's possible
Actions
on Google for the Google Assistant — We brought Actions on Google to phones,
introduced new features and functionality, improved our SDK and more. We also
launched the Actions Console, a new developer console that helps developers work
as a team, and collect data on app usage, performance and user discovery
patterns. This new console is integrated with the Firebase and Google Cloud
consoles.
VR
and AR at Google — We'll have more to share on the latest Daydream platform
features and developer tools during our "VR and AR at Google" session tomorrow
(May 18) at 9:30 AM PT in the Amphitheatre and on the livestream.
It's important to us that developers are successful. In addition to building
products that help solve developer challenges, we're on the ground in over 130
countries, growing and expanding the developer community through programs such
as Women Techmakers & Google
Developer Groups (GDGs).
We're also investing in training programs like Google Developers
Certification and courses through Udacity and other partners to help
developers deepen their technical capability. We're also excited to announce two
large multi-product developer events, Google Developer Days, which are planned
for Europe (September 2017 in Krakow, Poland) and India (December 2017 in
Bangalore, India). If you are interested to find out more, sign up for updates
on g.co/gdd2017.
During Google I/O, attendees and viewers have an opportunity to dive deep into
a number of these areas with 14 content tracks and 140+ breakout sessions --
covering Android to Assistant to VR -- and all livestreamed. We've also launched
over 70 codelabs to get
developers up and running with our latest APIs today.
Whether it's Android, Chrome, Play, VR/AR, the Cloud, and the Mobile Web — we're
constantly investing in the platforms that connect developers to billions of
users around the world. Thank you to the continued support and feedback from the
developer community.
When we first announced the Google Assistant, we talked about helping users get things done no matter what device they're using. We started with Google Allo, Google Home and Pixel phones, and expanded the Assistant ecosystem to include Android Wear and Android phones running Marshmallow and Nougat over the last few months. We also announced that Android Auto and Android TV will get support soon.
Today, we're taking another step towards building out that ecosystem by introducing the developer preview of the Google Assistant SDK. With this SDK you can now start building your own hardware prototypes that include the Google Assistant, like a self-built robot or a voice-enabled smart mirror. This allows you to interact with the Google Assistant from any platform.
The Google Assistant SDK includes a gRPC API, a Python open source client that handles authentication and access to the API, samples and documentation. The SDK allows you to capture a spoken query, for example "what's on my calendar", pass that up to the Google Assistant service and receive an audio response. And while it's ideal for prototyping on Raspberry Pi devices, it also adds support for many other platforms.
To get started, visit the Google Assistant SDK website for developers, download the SDK, and start building. In addition, Wayne Piekarski from our Developer Relations team has a video introducing the Google Assistant SDK, below.
And for some more inspiration, try our samples or check out an example implementation by Deeplocal, an innovation studio out of Pittsburgh that took the Google Assistant SDK for a spin and built a fun mocktails mixer. You can even build one for yourself: go here to learn more and read their documentationon Github. Or check out the video below on how they built their demo from scratch.
This is a developer preview and we have a number of features in development including hotword support, companion app integration and more. If you're interested in building a commercial product with the Google Assistant, we encourage you to reach out and contact us. We've created a new developer community on Google+ at g.co/assistantsdkdev for developers to keep up to date and discuss ideas. There is also a stackoverflow tag [google-assistant-sdk] for questions, and a mailing list to keep up to date on SDK news. We look forward to seeing what you create with the Google Assistant SDK!
By Sunil Vemuri, Product Manager for Actions on Google
Since we launchedthe Actions on Google platform last year, we've seen a lot of creative actions for use cases ranging from meditation to insurance. But one of the areas where we're especially excited is gaming. Games like Akinator to SongPop demonstrate that developers can create new and engaging experiences for users. To bring more great games online, we're adding new tools to Actions on Google to make it easier than ever for you to build games for the Google Assistant.
First, we're releasing a brand new sound effect library. These effects can make your games more engaging, help you create a more fun persona for your action, and hopefully put smiles on your users' faces. From airplanes, slide whistles, and bowlingto cats purring and thunder, you're going to find hundreds of options that will add some pizzazz to your Action.
Second, for those of you who feel nostalgic about interactive text adventures, we just published a handy guide on how to bring these games to life with the Google Assistant. With many old favorites being open source or in the public domain, you are now able to re-introduce these classics to Google Assistant users on Google Home.
Finally, for those of you who are looking to build new types of games, we've recently expanded the list of tool and consulting companies that have integrated their development solutions with Actions on Google. New collaborators like Pullstring, Converse.AI, Solstice and XAPP Media are now also able to help turn your vision into reality.
We can't wait to see how you use our sound library and for the new and classic games you'll bring to Google Assistant users on Google Home! Make sure you join our Google+ community to discuss Actions on Google with other developers.
