I got a Google Home — but can I build Actions myself ?

Back in Google I/O 2017 I was astonished and incredulous that Google gave one google home to every and each one of the attendees. I put my hands on my Google Assistant — and from that moment on I knew I had found my new passion, little did I know I would have so many sleepless nights playing with it!

Video made by Steffy of the first moments with my home.

I then got back home to London and started to play with it by google searching via voice and testing the commands and looking for the easter eggs, I know you have done this too.

First interactions with Google Home

It was time to start doing it myself! I took the time to study the Natural Language Understanding Dialogflow by reading its documentation, trying out the google codelabs and experimenting with it, really.

Studying Dialogflow

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” (Tao Te Ching, Verse 64)

I then took my chance and faced my fears of talking in public and gave my first talk on chatbots both using the assistant and integration for facebook messenger in ruby at Tech Know Day.

There were many other talks after that one, I alongside with our GDG Cloud London hosted one event and invited two Google Developer Experts (Francesco and Steve) to talk and give workshops on the assistant, and everyone loved it! It was so exciting to see what could be done using the assistant.

T-shirts for GDG Cloud London Actions on Google event

Another big achievement was my first app finally being accepted and published.

First app published

Did you know you can also build your first conversational app in a matter of minutes and be rewarded for it. As written on the Actions on Google website “Starting with a $200 monthly Google Cloud credit and an Assistant t-shirt when you publish your first app, the perks and opportunities available to you will grow as you hit milestone after milestone. "

Some of my talks:

I love to experiment with the Google Assistant, help others who are also learning and to write about the things I learn. If you have you ever thought of playing a voice message to a Google Home connected to the same wifi network you can read what I wrote here.

Happy coding to all of us and I would love to see the things you’ve built! You can check other apps created by other developers at the Google Assistant Directory.