At the ongoing Google I/O 2016 event, Google has officially introduced Google Assistant. As its name suggests, it is meant to act as your assistant, and it’s pretty smart: you can even talk to it.
Google Assistant is described as a “conversational assistant,” and this – surprisingly – holds true in many ways. According to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, you can ask Google Assistant complex questions, and it is able to understand what you want. In fact, it can even keep that context for follow-up questions. While this sounds a lot like Google Now, Google Assistant is capable of much more than this.
For one, Google Assistant works in tandem with a lot of the company’s other services. These include YouTube, Search, and even Maps; you can ask Google Assistant to show you video of a certain subject, and it will do so by showing said video on YouTube. Other than that, the interface of Google Assistant shown at the event looks a lot like a typical chat interface, and it appears users can really interact with Assistant like it was a chat bot. Hence, “conversational assistant.”
Based on what Google has showcased on stage, Google Assistant seems to be a really powerful service. It is able to understand context, interact with users, and it can even perform certain actions that can be quite a hassle, such as getting movie tickets. Then again, it remains to be seen just how effective Google Assistant will be in real-life usage, but it does seem promising.
At the time of this writing, it is not known yet how Google will integrate Google Assistant to its services. Chances are, it may be featured on the company’s upcoming operating system, Android N.
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