Google today announced a big upgrade for Assistant that'll enable it work with third-party Android apps, letting you search and perform actions in side of them with your voice.
The new feature supports 30 of the top apps on Google Play and will add more of them soon. So for example, you could say something like "Hey Google, search for candles on Etsy" or "Hey Google, find Motivation Mix on Spotify" and the Google Assistant will perform that action for you.
Here are some other examples of things you can ask the Google Assistant to do in third-party apps:
- "Hey Google, check news on Twitter."
- "Hey Google, send a message to Rachel on Discord."
- "Hey Google, send snap with Cartoon Lens."
- "Hey Google, start my run with Nike Run Club."
- "Hey Google, when is my Walmart order arriving?"
- "Hey Google, log a berry smoothie on MyFitnessPal."
- "Hey Google, order a smoothie on Postmates."
- "Hey Google, check my accounts on Mint."
- "Hey Google, tighten my shoes with Nike Adapt."
What's more, you can create custom shortcut phrases to make actions that you perform regularly even faster. So instead of saying "Hey Google, tighten my shoes with Nike Adapt," you could create a shortcut that lets you just say, "Hey Google, lace it."
You can see suggested shortcuts or just starting making your own by saying, "Hey Google, show my shortcuts" to jump to your settings.
Google says support for performing actions inside third-party Android apps is now available globally in English. It works on all Assistant-enabled Android phones.
This is a pretty big addition to Google Assistant. Now you can run shortcuts to perform actions inside of third-party apps like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, and Postmates to get things done quickly, just like you normally would inside of Google's own apps. Apple has something similar with Siri Shortcuts on iOS, and so it's great to see Google expanding doing its own thing to make Google Assistant even more useful.