DAVID KAUFMAN: Hi, I'm David Kaufman, product manager
for the Assistant ecosystem, and it's a privilege
to talk to you about some of the improvements we're bringing
to the development platform.
As you heard in the keynote, we've made a lot of progress
since rolling out Actions Builder and SDK back in June.
And I want to share some additional details
about these improvements, and walk
through some of the new features,
and provide a sneak peek of those coming soon.
First up are the new voices.
Speech is a fundamental building block
of the conversation platform.
And even as we continue to invest
in better visual experiences and capabilities,
we want speaking to Google Assistant
to be a delightful experience.
Early in the platform's life, a lot of partners
solved this problem with custom voice recording.
But we continue to improve the quality of our voices,
and we're excited with these new offerings that
are available to all developers now.
And they have improved the intonation,
and they sound a lot more natural.
SPEAKER 1: This is one of the new voices,
and it's available through the Actions console.
We hope it makes your actions more
enjoyable for all your users.
DAVID KAUFMAN: Last year at I/O, we announced Interactive Canvas
as a way to combine the power of voice
with visuals and touch interfaces.
It's available for smart displays, as you know,
as well as Android devices.
And it's based on open web technologies
you're already familiar with, such as HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript.
Now, back in June, we previewed Continuous Match Mode,
which allowed a Canvas experience
to respond immediately to a user's speech,
enabling more fluid dialogue and a more responsive experience.
Today, this technology begins rolling out,
and will be available for select partners
to build into their Canvas actions.
I want to take a look at what's possible
when we've started to move beyond prompted response.
[GOOGLE ASSISTANT ACTIVATION NOISE]
SPEAKER 2: Circles.
Oval.
Instrument.
Trumpet.
Metal disks.
Give me a hint.
Give me another hint.
Oh, toilet paper.
DAVID KAUFMAN: In the next session,
you'll hear directly from a partner who
has built with this capability, so I
hope you'll stick around and learn from that.
Next up, let's talk about ways we're
improving the Actions Builder IDE.
Now that you can visualize the entire conversation flow,
it's important to make sure you're
building a high-quality experience
and can easily jump to different parts of your action
to make changes and enhancements.
This is one of the reasons we're introducing
a fully integrated search bar.
Searching inside Action Builder allows
you to quickly find and identify all the different parts
of your action, from prompts, to intents, to scenes,
and training phrases.
What's more, you can jump directly
to that part of the IDE and make changes.
We believe that this will provide a better building
experience and make it simpler to manage your action as it
grows more complex.
But that's not the only improvement
we're making to help raise the quality of experiences.
I suspect many of you have been testing your actions manually
with a nearby device or with extensive cycles
in the simulator.
We know it's a pain point, and shortly we'll
be bringing a new testing API to market.
It's based on the simulator, and it
will allow programmatic manipulation of your action
and lower the effort to test all of your most important user
journeys.
To get started, you define testing code
as you normally do using the testing
framework of your choice.
The client library will help you with all the frequently used
assertions to streamline the development process.
This testing API changes the paradigm of manually testing
actions, and it allows you to write procedural tests
and see results.
We worked hard in the recent months
to launch our new platform and increase the compatibility
with widely adopted tools from the ecosystem.
First, I'd like to talk about Voiceflow,
a collaborative design and prototyping platform that
lets you quickly build and push actions for Google Assistant.
We're happy to say that this has just
become even easier with Voiceflow's new Actions SDK
integration.
Let's take a look.
[MOUSE CLICK]
Next is Jovo, a widely used framework
that allows developers to build voice experiences that work
across devices and platforms.
Similar to Voiceflow, Jovo has built a new integration
with our platform to take advantage
of the same improvements that are available for developers
using Actions Builder and SDK.
We're serious about having your business succeed with Google
Assistant, and we recognize that serving users
with premium or personalized content
requires linking accounts with your services.
As of today, developers can use Link with Google and App Flip.
Let's talk about how you build these into your experience.
First up is Link with Google.
A user begins their journey inside a familiar app, yours,
where they've already logged in.
A few clicks gets them through a complete account linking flow,
and they don't have to re-enter their credentials.
This eliminates the need to link accounts
during the conversation, it increases the awareness
of your Google Assistant experience
from inside your existing app, and gives your users
an authenticated experience when using your action.
It works with both Android and iOS.
And to take advantage of this, you'll
need to use the authorization code flow version of OAuth.
Next, let's focus on App Flip.
This is a great solution if your app
is installed on the majority of your customers' mobile phones
already.
It will allow users to quickly link their existing account
to Assistant by flipping to your app,
and avoids having to enter a password manually.
This approach greatly increases linking conversion,
and provides a superior user experience.
I want to talk about action links, which we're
re-branding as Assistant Links.
These links can now support rich assistant interactions
such as account linking directly embedded in your website.
We will also be expanding the reach of assistant links
beyond mobile.
So your users can click to directly open actions
on a smart display.
With this capability, any user browsing your website
from either their desktop or mobile phone
can simply click and watch their smart display come to life
to experience your action without using
any special invocation phrases.
Sharing assistant links via social media
is also a great way to harness the inherent virality
of the web to drive additional adoption.
Finally, to streamline the process
of creating and managing these assistant links,
we've created a new web tool, which
you can find via our documentation
or inside the developer console.
Now, one of the special things about smart home devices,
and displays in particular, is that they're
inherently communal.
Whether you're contacting your family,
sharing music, or playing a collaborative game,
you're doing it together on the device.
However, this has been a challenge from the developers'
perspective, because sometimes you
want to build a shared experience for everyone
in the household and not have to manage individual profiles
or accounts.
That's why we're beginning to test household account linking.
This capability will allow an identified adult
to choose to share their state with all users of the device.
As an example, let's say you're building
a puzzle that everyone can work on
as they walk past the device.
Under the old paradigm, each person who invoked the action
would receive a new instance of the puzzle.
With household authentication, every user
can share that experience.
To enable this feature, you just need
to select household account linking in the console,
and each user will be prompted to share
the account with their household during the linking process.
Now let's talk about improvements
we're making to the transaction flow on smart displays.
We want to make it easier for you
to add seamless monetization capabilities
to your experience.
Right now, when a user makes a purchase,
they're sent to a mobile phone to complete the transaction.
This isn't ideal for the user.
So we're working to overhaul how transactions work so that it
can be done either directly on the device
or with the user's voice to significantly reduce friction.
Our first step here will be launching on display CVC entry
early next year.
And you should expect much more from us
on this front in the next few quarters.
Much of what I've shared today is
only available on our new platform, Actions Builder
and SDK.
And we know that some of you have experienced great success
with Dialogflow.
Well, we don't want you to have to start from scratch.
So we're releasing a migration tool
that automates much of the work to bring
your Dialogflow-based actions over to the new platform,
so you can take advantage of these rich capabilities.
To get started, you pull up your action in the console
and choose to preview the migration.
You'll also see an option to learn more
about the process, which will highlight how your action will
be rendered on the new platform, and it
will map familiar Dialogflow concepts to their equivalents.
As we announced at the VOICE Global event,
the new platform has significantly reduced latency.
So your users should have a better experience
with your action, even before you take advantage
of all these new capabilities.
Everything we've talked about today
can be found on our developer site.
What's more, with the recent success of games
on smart displays, we've learned a tremendous amount
about what it takes to make a great voice forward,
visual experience that players also love.
We want to share that knowledge to help developers like you
succeed on our platform.
And so we're launching a new games portal.
Really, it's an in-depth guide on how
to build great games for the Google Assistant.
Here, you'll find design guidelines
for voice-forward experiences, case studies
from recently launched games, and featured documentation
to help you leverage the platform to deliver
your creative vision.
Additionally, we know many game developers
have been asking for better tools
to help improve their visual experiences.
We're happy to announce that we're rolling out
support for Chrome DevTools to allow developers
to debug their interactive Canvas web apps directly
on smart display devices.
Check out the portal for these new resources
and for information on accessing Continuous Match and all
the latest technologies.
Thank you for the attention, and I really
hope you share our excitement for the platform.
From adding new capabilities and better tools that
unlock higher quality experiences, to improving
account linking and transactions so we better
serve your business needs, we're continuing
to invest in making this a robust ecosystem
for developers.
Next, I'd like to introduce my colleague, Niranjan,
for a conversation with one of our partners,
CoolGames, that's on the leading edge of innovation
for visual experiences.
That starts right now.
NIRANJAN KUMAR: Thank you, David.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Niranjan Kumar.
I'm the gaming lead for the Google Assistant platform.
I am incredibly excited to introduce you
to Laurens Rutten, who is the CEO and founder of CoolGames.
They're a game development studio based out of Amsterdam,
and they specialize in building HTML5 games
across several different innovative platforms.
Laurens, I would love to give you a chance
to introduce yourself, and tell us more about the work you
do at CoolGames.
LAURENS RUTTEN: Hi, Niranjan.
Thanks for having me.
It's a great pleasure to be here.
Indeed, I founded CoolGames 10 years ago
as one of the first HTML5 specialized game companies
around.
We focus on developing high quality casual games,
and we do that both with our in-house developed IPs,
but also in partnerships with famous triple-a brands
such as, Tetris, Angry Birds, or Monopoly.
And we have been launching games over many different HTML5
platforms over the years, and now Google Assistant
is the latest one.
NIRANJAN KUMAR: That's great to hear.
I wanted to especially highlight the work
that you've done with the hit game Guess the Drawing,
where users have to race against the clock
to try and verbally guess the drawing that's
being pictured on the screen.
I know you have a ton of history and knowledge of games,
and I wanted to see what your thoughts were
on how voice particularly has a role in the games industry,
and where you think the future goes.
LAURENS RUTTEN: Yeah, I think, of course, very good question.
And honestly, if you would have asked me this question one year
ago, I wouldn't have given it too much thought at that time.
But of course, in the last almost one year now--
nine months--
we've been working on a couple of voice-operated games.
And I have to say that I didn't realize before how naturally it
can actually be to include voice for operating a game.
And it feels just as a normal addition,
and I think if you asked me, I would say,
this will become a standard on many more platforms.
And I could totally see, for example,
playing a Playstation 5 game with both controller
in my hands, you are also giving voice commands.
Now that we have been in this experience,
I think that would be totally doable,
and probably many platforms will follow.
That's what I think, and I wouldn't expect that
one year ago when we sort of started looking at this.
NIRANJAN KUMAR: That's very exciting.
I'm also incredibly curious to see what the future holds,
especially in voice.
I guess I have to ask--
I know I'm very excited about the opportunities
that developers have to build on the Google Assistant platform.
What was the experience like building Guess the Drawing
with the Assistant?
LAURENS RUTTEN: So, I think you can
say that on the technical side, if you
are an experienced developer, and you get all the tools
and the setup and environment of Google,
it's relatively easy to set up and to start
working on game projects.
One of the things we like very much in RStudio,
and the devs really liked, is that we could actually
also use our own tools and our own engines
that we built over the years, and port them tools
and work with the Google Assistant platform.
So the combination of the Google toolset
that you get from out of the box when starting,
and then the customization with our own tools and engines
worked really well.
I'm very happy about it, and especially my devs
are very happy about that.
NIRANJAN KUMAR: Yeah, likewise, same here.
We love collaborating together, and I
think that was our goal as well, to make sure
that our tools complement yours as well in terms of building
native experiences.
Was it easy or difficult building Guess the Drawing?
LAURENS RUTTEN: So, having been launching games
over many different platforms in the past,
and also being a launch partner for several platforms,
I have to say that it was relatively good to do.
I mean, again, making the game itself technically
was not the biggest challenge.
I think the main challenge, and the main learning for us,
was actually in how to build good voice games.
What's a good voice flow?
How does it work?
What's your natural way of talking to your game?
And I think that's where we had the most challenges,
but all in all, it was pretty easy to actually develop
games for this platform.
It was quicker than we expected, I can say that, yes.
NIRANJAN KUMAR: Well, that's great to hear.
That's what we love.
For future voice developers who are building on this platform,
what is one tip that you would highlight or recommend?
LAURENS RUTTEN: Yeah, I think that would be mainly
on the game design side.
And I would really recommend game designers
to take time and think about what the voice flow will be.
And again, if voice is first, forget
the touch is the first, primary control,
but instead voice is the primary control.
What does that change to a normal mobile game,
for example?
And the best way of doing it is actually just start a project,
test it, adjust it, iterate it, test again.
And I think that's especially for people
new in the field of voice games.
I think that's where probably the most
lessons are to be learned, and some time needs to be taken.
NIRANJAN KUMAR: I completely agree.
I think voice design and conversational design
is especially important, especially
when you're building through to the game designed for voice.
Laurens, I want to thank you so much for your time.
I love Guess the Drawing, I love playing it,
and really enjoyed the insights and the details
that you provided on what it takes to build on the Google
Assistant platform.
We heard David speak earlier, and I'm also
very excited to see the new features that we have
and the toolsets that we have for our developers
when they want to build native experiences on the Google
Assistant platform.
You'll be able to find all of these things
on our Google Assistant developer website,
and be able to find all of the tools
you need to create really high quality, immersive, voice
experiences.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]