JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: By extending your Android
application with Google Assistant,
your users can launch and complete tasks with your app
faster.
App Actions is how developers can integrate Google Assistant
into your Android app and is how end users can
launch and control Android apps with their voice.
Let's take the user journey of ordering a pizza.
It could be quite a process if your app isn't voice enabled.
First, your user will have to find the app
icon in the sea of icons, then find in the app
where they could start an order, then select
they want to order a pizza, and finally customize their pizza
to include the sauces, cheeses, and toppings they want.
Not too bad, but imagine a user being
able to say, "Hey, Google, order pizza from ExampleApp,"
and the app is automatically opened and an order started.
Now all they need to do is customize the pizza.
So much easier.
App Actions allows Android developers
to add voice commands to their apps to accelerate tasks
like these for your users.
By saying, "Hey, Google, order pizza from ExampleApp,"
there's enough context to open the ExampleApp directly
to the order page for a pizza.
From a user's perspective, this might feel magical.
But you can think of this experience as two parts.
First is processing the user's input
in which you'll be harnessing the power of Google's
natural language understanding to figure out
what your user wants to do in your app.
The second is fulfillment, what you
want to present to your user as a response.
Let's go over how it works, key concepts,
and highlight some key features.
Let's break down what is happening with the example
of ordering a pizza.
When a user says, "Hey, Google, order pizza from ExampleApp,"
Google Assistant will process the user's input
using Google's NLU and matches an intent from the user speech.
Assistant knows which capabilities
you support when your app is uploaded to the Play Store.
Capabilities represent in a generic way for an app
to expose external entry points into the app.
In this example, Assistant uses a capability
that matches the built-in intent of order menu item.
A built-in intent, or BII for short,
is a predefined trigger for a specific kind of functionality
that the user wants to do.
In this example, its order menu item,
which supports user journeys of ordering a specific menu item
or cuisine type.
Google builds and maintains language models for BIIs
to understand every possible variation of a query that
relates to that particular intent,
meaning you don't have to.
BII's RA support many different languages,
and we're always improving them.
Because of this, as Google Assistant improves its language
support, your app automatically benefits from these efforts.
The majority of BII's also have fields,
which identify possible elements in a user's query, which
[INAUDIBLE] Android application as parameters.
For this example, "pizza" will be pass as a parameters value.
So the Assistant has matched the BII of an Order Menu item
and has pulled the intents parameters
from the user's request.
It knows about your supported capabilities
because they are listed in your shortcuts.xml,
along with how to fulfill them.
Then it launches the app using the Android Intent that
was declared in the capability.
This jumps users straight into My Apps correct screen as well
as any of the parameters the user provided.
With this example, the capability
use of BII, let's dive a little deeper
on what kinds are available.
App Action supports tons of BIIs,
and there's a whole category of common BIIs
the majority of Android apps can use, like Open App feature,
which allows users to launch an apps feature.
Or Get Thing, which searches for a specific thing using
the default in-app search feature in the application.
Make sure to check this list out first
when considering using BIIs.
We also have so many more BIIs, that we've organized them
into several categories.
Here's just a few of them, like Order Food, Communication,
and Fitness.
Check out the docs for the full list of BIIs.
For unique functionality that isn't supported with BIIs,
developers can use Custom Intents.
Custom Intents are developer created intents
that function similar to the BIIs,
although you need to provide additional information.
We recommend using BIIs first.
And if you cannot find the functionality you want to use,
then use Custom Intents.
Check out the docs for more information.
This is just the beginning of App Actions.
There's tons of features and toolings
that you can use to support voice controls.
Once you have the capability defined,
you can also define shortcuts that invoke the capability.
You can think of shortcuts as an instance of a capability,
with some of its parameters having predefined values.
Shortcuts are ideal for situations when users leave out
information or assume your application
already contains information.
For example, if you're using the Create Taxi Reservation BII,
a user might say something like, hey, Google, order me
a ride home from Example app.
Home isn't an actual address.
But with shortcuts, you can take that into account
that users would say, home.
And you can have your Android app handle that
correctly by passing home as a token
so your app can resolve this.
For your most critical user journeys,
you can suggest to your users to create an Assistant shortcut
in your app, which is a phrase that
triggers a particular shortcut.
For example, at the end of purchasing our pizza
from the example before, you can offer the user
to create an Assistant shortcut.
So next time they say, "Hey, Google, get my usual pizza,"
the Android app opens with the user's preferred pizza
and is ready to be ordered.
In-app promotion allows a developer
to initiate the creation of an Assistant shortcut.
You could do this by constructing
a special deep link that has the app's own deep link
parameters inside it.
You can utilize widgets as a way to fulfill a user's query.
This option is great for situations that require
short or simple response.
For example, a user who forgot what time a reservation is
at and wants to easily get the time of the reservation.
Finally, regardless of what you want to implement,
you'll want to test out your App Actions
before publishing your app.
You can do that with Google Assistant's plug-in
for Android Studio.
This was a brief overview of App Actions.
If you want to get started learning how to build,
check out our code labs for a step-by-step guide
on how to build your first App Actions.
And of course, check out our docs for more details.
Join our dev community on Reddit,
where you could chat with other Action on Google developers.
And stay up to date by following us on Twitter.
I'm Jessica.
Thanks for watching.
And I can't wait to see what you build.