Google's Assistant will spread to non-Google devices in 2017

Google Assistant, the company's new smart personal assistant, needs to work with a lot of different services to really respond to all users' needs -- and that means Google needs to open it up for partners.

At its big event on Tuesday Google said it will launch a platform in December that will let third party developers create "actions" for the Assistant. Furthermore, the company will launch an Assistant SDK next year, meaning it'll eventually be available on devices other than Google's Pixel phones and Home.

Google Engineering Director Scott Huffman showed several examples on how Google Assistant will work with third-party services, from turning on your lights to playing your Spotify playlists.

These are so-called "Direct Actions," which instantly trigger a simple response based on a user's request.

The other type of actions are called "Conversational Actions" and Huffman gave an example of requesting an Uber ride. In this scenario, a user will ask for an Uber, and then the Assistant will ask for a destination. Once the user provides that, the Uber is hailed, and the user is informed of the rider's name and car type.

To learn more about Actions on Google, you can sign up for updates over at developers.google.com/actions/. Huffman said Actions on Google will launch in early December.

But getting Assistant to work with other services is one thing. Google has much grander plans for its smart assistant -- it wants everyone to be able to add it to their devices. To enable that, the company will launch an embedded Google Assistant SDK in 2017.

Huffman said he'll have more to share about that "in a few months;" right now, he said this will put the Assistant onto pretty much anything, from a Raspberry Pi to a mass-market consumer device.