Google continues to improve the Google Assistant with additional integrations in an effort to stay competitive with Amazon's Alexa home assistant. Google Home just received the ability to detect who is talking to the device and it can also read you step by step instructions for recipes, for instance. We're even seeing signs of it being able to read your notifications to you, but that's not live just yet. Google still has some more catching up to do to compete with the Amazon Echo products, but they seem committed to this project and are continuing to add features.

The Amazon Alexa personal assistant was everywhere at CES this year. Companies are utilizing Amazon's SDK to embed their personal assistant into products that you would never think could benefit from one. Google realizes this is a great way to increase the adoption rate of their platform, so yesterday they announced the Google Assistant SDK. The SDK includes a gRPC API, a Python open source client that handles authentication and access to the API, sample code, and thorough documentation.

Developers who want to test things out will need to head on over to the Google Assistant SDK website which can be found here. As mentioned, the official SDK even comes with some sample projects such as one from Deeplocal who used the SDK to build a DIY robotic Mocktails Mixer. Google says this initial release is a developer preview of the SDK so some features will be missing.

Google didn't go into too many specifics here, but did say that hotword support and companion app integration will be coming in a future release of the SDK. Wayne Piekarski is from Google's Developer Relations team and he even uploaded a introductory video for those who want to learn more. The video includes some details about features this first developer preview of the Google Assistant SDK includes and also gives some suggestions about what you could build with it.

Source: Google Developers Blog