GDE Spotlight: Meet Allen
New year, new you, new Actions on Google developer Spotlight blog series!
We have many amazing Assistant Google Developer Experts (GDEs) on our platform, and we are excited to introduce them to you in this Spotlight series!
Actions on Google (AoG) is a developer platform that lets you create Actions for the Google Assistant. It is available across more than 1 billion devices, including smart speakers, phones, cars, TVs, headphones, watches, and more. This series will allow you to learn more about our platform through our GDEs’ experiences and learn more about them, too!
In our very first Spotlight blog, we are featuring Allen Firstenberg.
Allen has been a GDE for the past 6 years. He has expertise in various product areas, including Google Glass, and we are lucky to have him on the Google Assistant. We sat down with Allen to learn more about him and his experience with the AoG platform.
What inspired you to become an Assistant GDE?
“It [the Assistant] is a new way for users to interact with technology,” Allen begins. “Voice allows you to approach problems in new ways; it even allows you to do things you could never do before. As a society, we talk about wanting to get away from hiding behind screens and ‘limiting screen time’. Actions are a great way to let people access the information they want quickly and easily.” Allen is particularly excited “to help people discover the potential and impact they can make once they realize the powerful things they can create with VUIs.”
What is some advice or encouraging words you have for new developers when creating their own Actions?
“Play to your strengths, and AoG will be there for you. If you’re already a web developer, you don’t need to abandon the platform or programming languages that you like working with. You can use them to develop your Actions with the skills you already are familiar with.
When you have problems, turn to the community for help, and let us help you. We all want to see great Actions, and we want to help, but we need information about the problems you’re experiencing. As you become more familiar with the platform, we’d love to see you help those just starting out.”
Was there something that surprised you when you first started developing on AoG?
Allen said, “I was surprised to discover how easy it was to get started on Actions on Google. I submitted my first Action eight hours after beginning!” He also mentioned that “a simple conversation can be built in as little as an hour. Even modestly more complicated ones are ready for testing in just a couple of days and ready to publish within a week.”
Allen’s go-to Action, which he uses in demonstrations regularly, is “Shakespearean Insult”. This is a fun Action that took him 4 hours to write, and it always gets people laughing when they use it. His other go-to is called “Vodo Drive”. This is a more serious one that he uses daily to save information to spreadsheets while he’s busy doing other things. One of Allen’s favorite Actions he’s seen was developed by a high school student — at one of the Build Actions for Your Community events he attended. The Action told the student the details of the class schedule based on the time and day. What Allen liked most about the Action was that it was “simple, useful, and easy to make part of his routine.”
What is your favorite AoG feature?
Allen believes “it would be a tie between media responses and account linking. Both allow developers to unleash the power of the platform in new and very different ways, depending on the needs of the developer and the Action they’re building.”
For context, Allen explained, “account linking lets developers tap into the huge range of APIs that are available through both Google and other parties, delivering the most context-relevant information to a user. Media responses help turn content delivery into a conversation instead of a one-way stream, making that content more personal and directed than ever before.”
What some of your proudest Achievements you have had as an Assistant GDE?
Allen has had plenty, but here are a few he shared with us:
- Allen has “answered over 575 questions tagged ‘actions-on-google’, ‘Dialogflow’, or ‘google-home’, and gained over 125,000 views of those answers on StackOverflow”.
- He’s reached Gold badge level for the ‘actions-on-google’ tag, which indicates over 1,000 upvotes on answers with those tags.
- Allen has presented at or run codelabs events in New York City, NY; Washington, DC; New Haven, CT; Boston, MA: Vancouver, BC: Toronto, ON: Orlando, FL; and Dallas, TX. “It is great to get out, meet other developers, talk with them about what they are working on and discuss where they’d like to see Actions go next. There are so many people with great ideas — I love helping them achieve their vision.”
What are some other hobbies you enjoy doing when you are not building for the Assistant?
Aside from being a part of the Action developer community, when Allen is not creating new Actions for the Google Assistant, he said, “I love photography and spending time with my family.”
You can follow Allen on Twitter, Github or Stackoverflow.
To get more updates on Actions on Google, follow us on Twitter @ActionsOnGoogle.
Stay tuned for our next Spotlight feature! Cheers!
