Basics of Google Assistant and Actions On Google

Published in

AndroidPub

3 min readMay 27, 2019

Ok Google, give me some knowledge about Google Assistant today.

Last year I have attended devFest chapters of Rajkot and Ahmedabad, there were many different talks related to the latest stuff of technology and programming. One of them was about Actions On Google and speaker was Jaldeep Asodariya. He taught us how to create your first google assistant application in the simplest way. So let’s just get the idea of what is Google Assistant and Actions On Google.

What Google Assistant Can Do?

With Google Assistant you don’t need to open application or click on any of the links, what you have to do is just give commands to an assistant and it will follow your command.

You can even get answers from it, and it’s almost accurate

So at the initial level, I had a doubt that what is the actual difference between Google Assistant and Action On Google. I have seen a lot of videos and read blogs, sometimes I heard it Actions on Google and sometimes it is Google Assistant. Let’s first see what are they :

Actions On Google

Actions on Google lets you extend the functionality of the Google Assistant with Actions. Actions let users get things done through a conversational interface that can range from a quick command to turn on some lights or a longer conversation, such as playing a trivia game.

So basically actions allow users to send a command to Google Assistant to complete things. For example, switch off lights/fan, set a reminder, what is the latest news, etc, etc.

Google Assistant

Google Assistant is an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant developed by Google that is primarily available on mobile and smart home devices.

Google Assitant is platform/application where actions of a user will be performed. It is available on mobile phones, Google Home, Google Mini devices. For example, if the user says “what’s weather today?”, Google Assitant will process the query and give an answer to users.

What kind of things you can develop using Actions On Google?

Well, the answer will be a very long list of applications but to make it smaller and simple I can say it gives you full ability to create a game, create actions to watch movies, create actions which shared the latest news, create actions which can ask user very funny questions, create an action which allows shopping experience better, create an action to order food.

What’s new for Actions On Google at I/O 2019?

How to markup
Built-in intents
Interactive canvas
Local Home SDK
New device types and traits
Google Assistant Connect

We will see in detail for each of the above topics in future articles.

You can also check already developed Google Assistant application at Google Assistant Explore.

Check List of Devices which supports Google Assistant.

In the next article, we will develop our first Google Assistant application by creating various basic action.