File this one under the “yeah, that makes sense” category. Google has made a slew of announcements regarding Google Assistant today at CES 2018. A lot of new products are coming out with Assistant support and with the AI-driven Assistant on over 400 million devices already, it is getting close being everywhere.
Now Google has decided to call your requests of Google Assistant what they really are: Actions. Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana have skills. Assistant has Actions. Google is referring to anything Assistant can do natively or through a third party integration as an Action going forward.
The verbiage makes sense. You are having Assistant preform an action on your behalf so it just makes sense to call them what they are going forward. The cool thing is, these Actions are expanding rapidly. Starting later this week, for example, Android Auto will start getting updated to support Assistant and Actions. There have been a significant number of Assistant devices announced, like the one from earlier today from iHome, that will be able to leverage all of these actions to meet your needs no matter the device you happen to be using at the time.
You can read the full post from the Google Blog to get all the details.
