OK Google, Talk To Northstar Pow Day!

Northstar Pow Day – Action on Google

Last week, we had a big storm at Tahoe.

I thought it might be great if with one quick question (while you washing our face in the morning) you can learn if it’s a powder day.
After all, when there is a pow day, you should close the shop and run for the slopes, no?

The result is here: pow-day-northstar.glitch.me and you can find the code at GitHub.

If you are on a mobile device, click here to check it on the assistant, or just say “Hey Google, talk to Northstar pow day”.

Have fun!

Advertisement

Generate TTS Using Your Terminal

It’s not a new hack but it will work well if you have short texts (1-3 sentences) that you wish to convert to speech.

After all, when returning a response to the Google Assistant, you can use a subset of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

Why?

Because you can make your agent’s responses seem more life-like experience.

How?

Open your terminal and try something like this:

curl "http://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/synthesize?lang=en-us&text=actions+on+google+rock" -o aog-rock-hack.mp3

That’s it.

If you want to use SSML and get fancy, it’s also support it in the request:

Hey Google, Talk to Coffee Trivia Game

During the holidays, I had a bit of time to do some fun stuff with Actions on Google.

It started with an idea that a runner friend brought up during a long run and the results is “OK Google, Talk to Western State Race“. If you are an ultra trail runner, you are smiling now, right?

Later, it was around another passion – good coffee. I used the templates for Google Assistant to create a fun trivia game. It’s super easy, as you only need to copy a google sheet and update it with your questions and answers.

You can check the result by clicking here (on mobile) or just say something like “OK Google, Talk to Coffee Trivia Game”.

How To Create A Shortcut In Google Assistant?

When you are using the google assistant for common task on daily basis it’s great to make a shortcut so with one word you can invoke a long ‘command’. One of the first shortcuts I have created is ‘bitcoin’ which is translated to “OK google, talk to bitcoin info about the price”. Let’s see below how you can easily work with the shortcuts inside the Google Assistant. See in the short video below how to create it and use it.

 

How to Build a Google Assistant App?

Apps for the Google Assistant are the gateway for your users to engage with your services through Google Home, Android phones, iPhones, and in the future, through every experience where the Google Assistant is available.

Building Conversational Experiences With Actions On Google

Here are the slides that I used this week in two events. It gives you a good overview of what can be done these days with Assistant Apps.

What is an Assistant App?

The Google Assistant is Google’s conversational software for helping you get things done in your world. It is the culmination of all of Google’s research in AI, ML and NLP. It runs on various devices, including the Google Home which launched in 2017, as well as many Android and iOS devices.

Actions on Google is the third-party platform for the Google Assistant, allowing you, the developer to manage a conversation between your service and the user.

An interesting times!

A Bitcoin Info Action!

 In the past few weeks I worked (20% of the time) on this new assistant application that will give you interesting information about Bitcoin.

Here is an example of what you can do:

• The price of bitcoin
• Market cap
• Blocks count
• Total amount of bitcoins

This is how the conversation looks like on the web simulator.
You open it with the main capabilities that it can provide:

Google #IO17 – Actions On Google

The past 3 days were packed with developers, sessions, announcements and good weather at Shoreline.

Here are some of the things that I really liked (and marked myself to try later):

What is new with the Google Assistant.

You can learn why actions on google is great option for developers and what you can do with it in your own hardware.

How to build apps for the Google Assistant

The Google Assistant’s mission is to help users get things done in their world.

This video below will explain how to plug into the Google Assistant services ecosystem. It covers everything from understanding the business use case and high level user interface design to implementation and growing usage.