Google Keep – Recipe Organizer

Google Keep is a great tool for organizing your recipes. It’s free, easy to use, and available on both desktop and mobile devices. With Google Keep, you can store all of your recipes in one place and easily access them whenever you need them. You can create separate notes for each recipe, and add tags (=label in Keep terminology) to them to make them easier to find. You can also add images and notes to each recipe to help you remember how to make them. And if you want to share a recipe with someone, you can easily do that too.

Hey Google, Talk To Highway 80 Conditions

 

Next time you are driving to Tahoe you don’t need to open the phone, navigate to the browser and check if the road is closed (or not).

You can just ask the Google Assistant: “Hey Google, Talk To Highway 80 Conditions”.

You will get the most updated data about the road like in the example below:

Please ignore the text formatting (which I’ll improve in the near future) as it should be use as voice only while you are driving.

Check it on the Google Assistant or on the web here.

If you are using Telegram check this.

Be safe!

 

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!

An Amazing Apps For The Google Assistant – Chatbot Summit 2018

Here are the slides from my talk today at the Chat Bot Summit.

It was a great experience to talk about the Google Assistant platform and to run two workshops with live coding.

If you could not make it and you wish to test this platform, you can go over the slides (and other tutorials or videos) and check on of the code labs that we have for the Assistant on your own.

There are many good apps that you can check in order to get ideas and inspiration. Here are some apps for the Assistant that I’ve created for the code labs and demos.

Good luck!

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.

 

Get Users to Your App For The Google Assistant

Did you know that your app for the Google Assistant can reach users on millions of devices? Over 100 million devices (and many more in the future) already have the Google Assistant with them so when users wish to use your app, you are already there. There is no friction. In this post we will focus on the methods you can use in order to reach users.

There are 4 ways for users to get to your app for the Google Assistant through:

1. Explicit triggering
2. Implicit Triggering
3. The Google Assistant Directory
4. The Assistant Directory link

Let’s go a bit deeper into each one.

Voice User Interface Design

We are all experts at human-to-human conversation. But conversing only seems easy because it’s familiar, you’ve been doing it since you were born.  The key to building a good voice interface is to not fall into the trap of simply converting a GUI into a VUI.

In the slides below, I will cover the best practices to design our Action on Google (and any other Voice UI).

You can also see the top tips in the short video below.

Google Assistant – Why? How?

In the past few years, the buzz about conversational experiences and digital assistants has increased. As you can see above, eMarketer is predicting that 87% of B2C marketers in the US will use chatbots and digital assistants  in their marketing efforts by 2021. 

We can see these days that conversational computing and digital assistants represent a new fundamental computing wave that brands can use more.

A big misconception is that the Google Assistant is ‘just’ for Google Home or other smart speakers.

It’s also on mobile (Android and iOS) devices (over 100+ millions devices) and in many other devices.

So your users are there already and you can reach to them without any friction.

The conversations users are having with the Assistant are not just about things that could be answered on Google Search. The Assistant helps with more than getting information – it helps you get things done.

From enjoying music and movies, ordering pizza and making restaurant reservations to controlling your smart devices and calling your best friend, the Google Assistant helps everyone be more productive in their world.