Google is opening Home to third party developers
Google Home is about to get a lot more useful.
The company is opening its voice-enabled Assistant to developers who can start creating "actions" for the device. Early partners will include media companies like NBC News, Buzzfeed and NPR, as well as consumer apps like Quora, Genius and Todoist.
The idea is similar to the "skills" developers create for Amazon's Echo line: companies can create "Conversation Actions" that link their services to Google Assistant on Home.
Using the actions created by Domino's, for example, you can ask Google Assistant to order you a pizza, or ask for the latest CNN headlines.
Unlike Alexa's skills that have to be manually enabled, Google notes that once developers create a conversation action, they're automatically available. "It really is a conversation -- users won't need to enable a skill or install an app, they can just ask to talk to your action," Jason Douglas, Google's product manager for actions, writes in a blog post.
The company is already working with a set of early partners to build actions for Google Assistant, but other developers can request access now as well.
Beerud Sheth, the CEO of Gupshup, a bot platform that is among the early Assistant partners, said he expects the number of developers on the platform to ramp up fast. "Developers will be able to very quickly build new bots and services in a matter of hours or days," Sheth tells Mashable.
Though Google is starting with Home, developers will also eventually be able to create integrations for Assistant on the messaging app Allo and the Pixel Phones, which have Assistant built in. Those integrations are "coming soon," Google says.
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
