Voice assistant platforms like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana have been largely closed off from third-party developers. However Amazon wasn’t quite as restrictive and opened Alexa up to other companies, resulting in a variety of gadgets and software being created that takes advantage of it.
We saw Apple quickly hop on board with the idea of opening Siri up to third-party developers, and now it looks like Google will do the same with Google Assistant. The company has recently announced that Actions on Google will be open to developers starting next month. For non-developers, basically this means that you can look forward to other apps and services and even hardware that will be able to leverage Google Assistant as its AI of choice.
At the moment we’re not sure who will be taking advantage of the SDK and embedding Google Assistant into their products, but it does sound like it has a lot of potential. As it stands, Google Assistant exists as an exclusive feature for their Pixel phones, but by opening it up to other developers we’ll be able to see the feature shine more, plus it will help Google catchup to Amazon who has had a pretty decent head start with Alexa. In the meantime we guess we’ll just have to wait and see what kind of products and services we can expect from this.
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