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TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: Welcome to "Assistant on Air,"
where we have conversations about building
for Google Assistant.
I'm Toni.
And I'll be your host today.
I'm a developer relations engineer for Google Assistant.
And today, we'll be chatting with Allen, one of our GDEs,
or Google Developer Experts, for Google Assistant.
Welcome, Allen.
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: Hey, Toni.
Great to be here.
Good to see you again.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: Yeah, great to see you too.
And I'm sorry we couldn't be in person, but hopefully sometime
soon in the near future.
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: Oh, I hope.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: [LAUGHS] So yeah, let's just dive right
into it.
So do you mind telling us a little bit about what you do?
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: Sure.
I'm Allen.
I work for a company called Objective Consulting, which
is a consulting company that helps our clients
kind of understand new technologies
and how they can do things better and mostly how
they can continue doing what they're doing better
to help their clients.
So we do a lot of that.
As you noted, I'm also a Google Developer Expert
for the Assistant and other technologies.
And I do, in some ways, much of the same thing,
helping developers understand how
to use new Google technologies to make their products better
and help their clients out with Google technologies.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: That's great.
Yeah.
And you definitely-- you're well known in the community,
and we appreciate all of your hard work
that you put out there.
So I know a lot of folks benefit from your expertise.
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: It's great working with the technology.
It's always a wonderful bunch of folks.
And I love doing what I do.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: That's great.
Well, so elephant in the room, as you know,
we had to announce that conversational actions are
being sunset in June 2023 and that we're
going to be pivoting our focus towards more Android
applications and specifically App Actions.
So do you have any experience with App Actions
and could you tell us a little bit about that?
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: I've been working with App Actions.
I started out slowly using the code labs
that you folks made available and kind of just getting
my feet wet, getting understanding on how they work
and how they fit into the entire Android app
platform in general.
So nothing out there yet, but I've
been exploring it and seeing what it can do
and exploring the potential and how these new technologies
fit in together.
And I'm pretty excited about the future of where all of this
is going and what's available today.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: Yeah, that's great.
And App Actions is kind of where conversational actions were
earlier on in their lifetime, as far as being single shots.
But what do you see as some of the benefits of App Actions
today for both developers and users?
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: I think the biggest thing
is to understand that App Actions are
fit into the Android platform as a whole.
So we take advantage of the fact that we've
got this very, very rich and well developed
platform, Android, over the past years,
and we're now bringing into it this new modality of voice
and audio so that we can use voice inputs as a way
to help control our apps.
And over time, we'll be able to use and understand better
how to do things like send responses back using audio.
So I think what's most exciting for me
is taking this very mature platform that we already
know how to do lots and lots of things with
and bringing into it this relatively new technology
of voice and audio and opening up a whole new dimension to app
developers and seeing what they're going to do with it
and what benefits they're going to be bringing to their users.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: Yeah, that's very helpful.
And I think it really will help us get to the point
where the Assistant is truly just an integrated
part of everybody's daily lives and day-to-day interactions
with their devices, whether those are auto devices
or wearables or something else.
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: I definitely agree.
I think what this starts to do is make the Assistant much more
ubiquitous.
We already have it as part of our lives.
This will also start increasing how it can be ambient,
how we can just use our voice at the right times
to invoke the apps that we're already familiar with
and already using.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: So you were talking about this
a little bit, but as far as the future of this,
what do you think some of the-- what are some of the features
that you're excited about or that you would like
to see of App Actions and/or just Assistant and Android
together in general.
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: Well, I think one of the great things
are the features that we're already seeing
that are part of App Actions.
So right now, App Actions--
the kind of basic intent of them is
to help you launch the actions that you already have
in a faster and easier way.
And I think as developers start to get
used to how App Actions can be deployed
and integrated into the apps that you already have,
you'll be able to make it better and easier
for your users to get right into the part of the app
that they're most interested in being.
So right now, you launch an app and you might present with them
with a menu screen or a top screen with a menu on it,
and you click on something and maybe you
need to enter some information or select an item
and you kind of drill down.
With App Actions and with a feature that's
known as Dynamic Shortcuts, you're
able to make it so that you can prompt a user,
do you want a way to go directly to this page with your voice?
And then in the future, they can invoke an app using that phrase
that they've determined and go right to the page
that they already want, with content pre-filled in.
So I can easily imagine, at some point in the future,
sometime in a near future in some ways,
they'll be able to issue a command do this,
and your app will do that, skip a bunch of pages,
fill in information that makes sense,
and speak back to them saying, OK, here's what I've done.
And that cuts out a lot of work of user
finding your app on their phone somewhere and opening
it and going to the screen and typing in information.
It really just streamlines that entire process.
And I really see that that's what
App Actions are kind of aimed at as streamlining that process.
And as developers understand that and understand better ways
that they'll be able to take advantage
of that streamlining and that personalized streamlining that
will be available, we're going to see
more and better and more interesting
uses of features that will be available.
I'm really, really excited to see
where Dynamic Shortcuts and similar features
will be evolving.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: Yeah, I agree with you.
I think it's really exciting to see what everyone's
going to be building.
So we'll have to wait and see.
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: [INAUDIBLE] that's
the fun part and the challenge of developing
is waiting to see what comes next and then building it.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: That's true.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much, Allen, for coming in and sharing
with us today.
We really appreciate it.
And we appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.
And we look forward to seeing you
at some of the community events that are coming up this season.
ALLEN FIRSTENBERG: I'm looking forward
to getting out into the community
and helping share how we can all make App Actions better
and just seeing everybody.
TONI KLOPFENSTEIN: Agreed, definitely.
Well, and for everyone, we hope that you like today's show.
And as always, if you have any suggestions for future episodes
that you'd like to see, please leave a comment below.
And also, as always, you can follow us
on Twitter for updates, new episodes,
and engage with the community.
And then also don't forget that we have a newsletter
you can sign up for.
So we've got lots of resources for you.
And I've been Toni.
And we'll chat with you next time.
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