Google announced the arrival of the Google Assistant back in the Google I/O 2016 event in May. The company released it in late September, as a part of Google Allo. Google would soon be opening Google Assistant to developers with APIs they are calling Actions on Google. Based on reports obtained via the XDA Developers website, the Google Assistant Developer Platform would be out by December, as Google will open up the APIs they all Actions on Google.
The Google Assistant is an enhanced version of Google Now, and is featured in Allo, Pixel, Pixel XL and Google Home. The long term success of any virtual assistant can perhaps be judged by how open it is to allow third party developers to associate with it. With Actions on Google, this is going to become a lot easier and accessible.
This third-party integration is one of the reasons why Amazon’s Alexa is so popular. With the Google Assistant Developer Platform coming out in a few days, it looks like the Google Assistant too, is heading in a similar direction.
Google Home which is the competitor of Amazon’s Echo devices, needs as many third party integrations as possible in order to truly be useful. As per the XDA reports, the Actions on Google APIs will release sometime in December, but we still do not have a concrete date as to when it would release! The landing page for Actions on Google is already live, and it has a feature which will notify the interested users as soon as there’s an update.
While many are ruling the Google Assistant as superior than Alexa just because it comes from Google and the potential it carries, the actual fact of the matter is that the Google Assistant does have a lot of catching up to do to truly go head-to-head with Alexa in terms of third party services! With Actions on Google, it will soon be possible.
