14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s smart service called Assistant first arrived on Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, which were announced earlier this month. But Google Assistant can be enabled on other smartphones as well and it will be included in Google Home and the Allo app.
There are many things that the Assistant can do, and Google presented some of its features during the launch of its Pixel smartphones. Unlike Google Now, Assistant can be used for engaging in two-way conversations and helps users get things done.
It can buy movie tickets on the go, find restaurants and help users navigate to wherever they need to be. It can be used to pull out relevant information and find out flight information, view pictures from the device’s storage or from Google Photos. Google Assistant was designed to compete directly against Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa.
It only works with Twitter and Google+ for now
It seems that Google Assistant can even be made to share articles to social networks, like Twitter or Google+. According to 9to5Google, the feature works on the new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones and it allows users to share articles that they’re currently reading.
The article and its title are transcripted so that they meet the requirements of the two networks. It seems that the feature doesn’t work on other services like Facebook, Gmail, or messaging applications like Hangouts or Allo. Still, it’s expected to arrive to Allo soon considering that the app has Google Assistant integration on the two phones.
IFTTT, a very popular application for creating chains of simple statements for triggering changes to social networks and services, also supports Google Assistant. The smart service from Google has recently received a channel in IFTTT, which would allow users to trigger various actions and even replies that Assistant would send. There are many recipes that would allow users to find their phone by voice or send Slack voice notes, for example.