Google received a lot of attention when the company launched its Google Assistant last year as it was a sign of where the company was headed in the future. Since then, they have introduced the Google Assistant SDK so that 3rd-party developers could leverage the platform. The company has been making changes to the software development kit over time, and today they have announced some new languages, API updates, and Device Actions.

We've seen how various 3rd-party developers have utilized the Google Assistant for all sorts of projects. LG used it to integrate Google Assistant into almost 90 of their appliances and Spotify has come out and said you'll be able to use voice commands to control their application. Google has even created a page dedicated to highlighting applications made with the Actions on Google platform and Google Assistant-enabled devices like Google Home.

Some new features have come to the Google Assistant SDK and the first comes in the form of additional languages and locales. Developers can now programmatically configure the API to use any of the following languages/locales: English (Australia, Canada, UK, US), French (Canada, France), German, and Japanese. The company has been receiving feedback from developers who feel that other input and output mechanisms are needed.

So this latest update to the Google Assistant SDK now supports text-based queries and responses. The company likes the way that the Google Assistant can be customized by the user and this is also possible on SDK-based devices as well. Certain customization options have been available already, but this new update allows SDK-based devices to be configured as a street address in the Google Assistant on your phone or as a latitude and longitude via the API.

Another common request that Google has received was the ability to use the Assistant to control various devices. So with the latest update to the SDK, they have added the new Device Action functionality to build Actions directly into your Assistant-enabled SDK devices. This is great for those times when the user says something such as "Ok Google, set the temperature to 78 degrees," since the Google Assistant will turn such queries into structured intents via cloud-based automated speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU).

This update to the SDK enables 3rd-party developers to provide the client-side code for actually fulfilling the Device Action itself without needing any other code.


Source: Google