Latest Google Assistant Beta Hints At Payment Capabilities

Amazon’s Alexa can do things like order you an Uber, order you a pizza, and make various purchases at your request. It looks like Google Assistant will soon be able to do the same because thanks to an APK teardown by the folks at XDA (via 9to5Google), it seems that Google has included payment capabilities in the latest beta update.

According to the teardown of the APK, it has been discovered that there are several strings of code that indicate that Google Assistant will soon be able to handle credit cards. It is unclear yet as to what exactly these payments will be used for, but it has been speculated that we’re probably looking at something similar to what Alexa does, which is for services and online shopping, like Google Express Shopping.

Uber has already been integrated into Google Home so we guess this payments support is really just an expansion of its capabilities. There is also a mention of Assistant featuring “shared devices”, which sounds like payments could be enabled on a device-to-device basis as opposed to across the board, which hopefully should prevent accidental purchases.

No word on when the new feature will be rolled out officially, but if it has been spotted in the latest APK, we reckon it shouldn’t be too long until it does.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Android, Google, Google Assistant