Google today announced several new improvements coming to Google Assistant on Wear OS by Google. The updates will take a few days to roll out to everyone and will give Assistant on your watch the ability to leverage Actions from Assistant and improved voice responses.
Google Assistant on Wear OS is not new. It rolled out with the latest generation of watches running what was then Android Wear 2.0. Rebranded as Wear OS by Google over the course of the past few months, Google has been focusing efforts on overall improvements in the platform as well with Assistant.
Actions allow you to do things with Assistant and are mostly used on Google Home and Assistant on Android devices. With this update, you will be able to give a command to the digital assistant to perform a task. For example, you could tell your watch to turn on the lights in the living room that are connected to your Smart Home. There are over a million actions that are available to Google Assistant so chances are you are already using them in some way. Now they have migrated to your watch.
Smart Replies are also coming to Wear OS in this update. Now if you use your Wear OS watch to check the weather, you will have a smart reply to check the next day’s forecast as an example.
All of these changes bode well for Wear OS as a platform and there are specific keynotes and breakout sessions at Google I/O 2018 next week on the platform.
