Google Assistant has grown up a lot in the past year thanks to developers and services leveraging APIs to create services for it. While Assistant still lags behind Amazon’s Alexa when it comes to the number of services available, the gap is closing.
That presents a challenge for users who are looking for a service or feature but aren’t quite sure if it is there. Google has addressed this and made it easy to find services for Google Assistant right from within it or the Google Home app. Now you can simply type in a keyword to search and the Assistant will return all of the services that do that particular thing that you searched.
You can get to this new search function one of two ways. You can bring up Google Assistant and use the Explorer button (the blue button at the top right of the
Google Assistant Explore Button
Assistant pop-up) or you can open up the Google Home app and go to the Menu>Explore. You will now notice there is a search box at the top of the page.
Within this search box you can type in a keyword and Google Assistant will bring up all the services that can are associated with that keyword. Now you can find services much faster and easier.
In addition to keywords, you can search for specific products too such as WeMo from Belkin for light controls.
The new search function in Google Assistant is a nice change and is one that is handy no matter if you are an early adopter of Google Home like me or not. Using the search I’ve found dozens of new services I didn’t know existed which, I suspect, is the entire point of this update by Google.
