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SPEAKER 1: Hi, everyone.
This is our overview session.
So if you're totally new to all this, hopefully,
it'll pique your interest.
Well, Actions on Google is the developer platform
for the Google Assistant.
Now, users are already coming to the Assistant
to perform over 1 million actions.
And they're performing these actions
across a huge range of devices and context,
from voice-enabled speakers like the Google Home
to phones to Android Auto to TVs, Chromebooks, and more,
bringing the number of devices where you can reach users
to over 500 million.
Actions are now available in 25-plus locales,
with more coming this year.
It still takes some work and technical know-how to get up
and running.
And that's why we provide templates to get you started.
No programming knowledge required.
You can create fun and engaging conversational actions
like Personality Quiz, Trivia, and Flash Cards.
All you have to do is come to the Actions
console and follow a step-by-step wizard
to get started with the template.
Then, you just fill out a Google Sheets spreadsheet
with the content.
Of course, I know most of you are developers, so that's never
going to be satisfying enough.
SPEAKER 2: Google is going to give me
this amazing tool for natural language understanding called
Dialogflow.
It turns that unstructured natural language input
into a structured representation that my endpoint can consume.
Dialogflow sits in the middle between the Assistant
and my server.
And it does that for me with hybrid machine
learning powered intent matching and entity recognition.
All right.
So the way Dialogflow intents work
is that you train them to listen for phrases that the user is
going to speak in each turn of dialogue.
And then each semantically similar set of phrases
is called an intent, right?
So with the power of machine learning,
when the user says anything similar to the phrases you've
provided at any point in the conversation,
Dialogflow is going to match that intent.
And how am I going to account for the variation
in the way each programming language is spoken?
Programming languages have nicknames.
Well, Dialogflow offers the feature of designating synonyms
for each canonical value.
But now the user is going to respond
with a request to know about some specific language.
Like, let's say they say, tell me about Kotlin.
And this time, the Google Assistant
is going to hand off directly to my action
because the user's already entered the dialog.
And it's going to handle the speech-to-text transcription.
And Dialogflow is going to match the
which language intent that I described earlier.
But this time, instead of responding,
it's going to reach out to my Webhook hosted
on Cloud Functions for Firebase.
And it's going to dynamically pull
information about that language and present it to the user.
And we're also announcing something really cool
that you've asked for for a long time.
You can create alpha and beta versions of your actions
that can be shared with a limited audience for feedback
and iteration.
SPEAKER 3: Let's talk about how built-in intents can also
help you get discovered.
So as you can see here, there are a ton of languages,
there are dialects, there are cultural differences,
there's slang, that all make a million different ways
to say the exact same thing.
Built-in intents can provide a common taxonomy for actions
across all of our Google surfaces.
So in this scenario, for example, you'll
see if somebody says, hey Google, I
want to start meditating, we can then
suggest just a few different actions
that we know will service that need
and are actually indeed meditation apps.
So here are some of the built-in intents that we're
working on this year.
You'll see the ones that are starred will be soon
in developer preview.
So the last tool that I'll talk about today for discovery
is called Action Links, which is an awesome tool
to help you promote your experience.
You'll see it here in the Headspace example
that we, Google, will actually promote these experiences
in our own Assistant Directory, where a user can actually
deep link directly from the app directory into your action
on the device of their choice.
Assistant Links is really, really easy to implement.
You can simply generate a URL really quickly and then
share across all of your channels.
We will soon open up the ability for app developers
to sell digital goods on the Assistant.
This will work across both phone and voice surfaces.
And we're thinking of three key use cases
here as we launch this--
in-app digital goods, subscription services,
and lastly, digital media purchases.
So what we know here is that people are creatures of habit.
So we've identified some of these clusters
and where the Assistant can actually provide extra value.
This new feature, Routines, lets users combine multiple actions
into a single command.
So daily updates are when Google can actually
share a notification and pull an update at a specified time
each day by the user.
One example of this is you could get transportation or news
alerts every single morning at the same time
if Google understands that about you.
Push notifications are really exciting because they
could help you do things in real time.
So things like getting stock alerts from your favorite news
publisher.
The value to users is that it actually-- it
helps give you access to relevant information, which
is immediate, it's content-rich, and it's specific to you.
What's really valuable to brands and to some of you folks
here as developers is that this can really
help you enhance your utility as a partner to some
of your users.
So thank you, everyone, so much for having us.
Enjoy the rest of your week.
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