Today at Mobile World Congress, Google has announced the expansion of the languages supported by Actions for Google Assistant, the SDK that allows developers to leverage Assistant in their apps and solutions. The new languages, which go live today, include:
- Hindi
- Thai
- Indonesian
- Danish
- Norwegian
- Swedish
- Dutch
These languages join English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Russian which are already supported. The new languages are fully supported in development tools too, like DialogFlow and, of course, the Actions SDK itself.
Further, Google is expanding the abilities of Actions in Google Assistant when it comes to Android app interactions & integration. You can now set a deep link within the Assistant action that points to a specific Android app. So, for example, if you have a reservation Action, you can add a link to open up the actual app on your Android device to view the details of that reservation.
Google states that, given Google Assistant will reach 95% of eligible devices by the end of 2018, these types of integrations and language improvements are critical for global adoption.
Finally, there is now a new askForPlaces in the Google Places API that will allow for voice interactions to be completed using geolocation information.
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.
Here is an example that Google showed in the announcement utilizing askForPlaces and Uber
All of these new features in the ADK and the API are now available for developers to start using immediately.
