Gadgetory

wait a second who are you I'm your Google assistant on the iPhone this week at Google i/o there are a ton of new announcements for the Google assistant you already saw this coming to the iPhone but now you're going to be able to type to it you're gonna be able to buy stuff with it you're going to be able to set up custom actions on it you're going to be able to see stuff with the camera and have it identified for you that's a lot to take in but let's start with the big news this is what the Google assistant looks like on the iPhone as you can see the Google assistant on the iPhone looks and works almost identically to how it works on Android but there are some new features so for example you can use the camera it can identify objects and then it can ask you questions about what you want to do with those objects so you see a concert watch it on YouTube or you can just order tickets or stick it directly on to your calendar that's coming later this year but the Google assistant is launching right away and what you can see here is it has a microphone you can just tap on it and ask for things and Google will give you the answers right here in that same conversational interface that they have on the iPhone you can even scroll back up to see your history of previous questions that you've asked it works really really well it's really simple and it's really really good at getting you answers from Google's ecosystem if you use it also you'll see here that you can type at it which is really convenient when you type to it it doesn't make noise so if you're in a room with other people you don't have to bother them you can just open it up start typing and get your answer it's something you can't do with Siri right now now for the iPhone they made a custom widget so that you can get to it directly from your home screen so you just swipe over tap on it and you can jump directly into a search from the Google assistant which is convenient because you can't do it from the home button and you'll notice last but not least if you search for an address it uses proper Google Maps not Apple Maps which honestly is better so that's the iPhone but there's a bunch of other stuff coming to the Google assistant that we need to talk about and when you look at all these features individually they might not seem that impressive but when you take them together it actually shows something really good it's that Google knows what it's doing with AI on the phone their previous attempts like now on tap or Google now ended up feeling kind of haphazard but with the Google assistant it's really clear that where Google is heading is that beautiful dream of the Starship Enterprise a computer that just does what you want without making you worry about apps and settings and text boxes and all the rest so let's take a look at these very first baby steps that they're taking to get there one of the new things coming to the Google assistant is that you can use third-party actions stuff you used to only be able to do in Google home but now it works on the phones so what we're looking at here is ordering food from Panera for delivery and what's really interesting is we didn't set up a Panera account we didn't set up a Panera skill and Google already knows our home address and it knows our credit card number it keeps all that stuff privately so I can just tap a button and send it off to Panera and I can just speak what I want and get it even though the assistant doesn't really get credit for it because you can't count skills like you can on Alexa Google's actually done a pretty good job working with smart home device manufacturers to make more stuff compatible they're up to 70 different manufacturers now and starting soon any of those manufacturers can go and register their new devices with Google so you won't have to wait for it to work so I could just say turn the lights off and off they go it's also going to start working with nest ok Google Play outdoor video in my living room so what's happening here is really obvious Google is requesting the video stream from my nest camera and displaying it over chromecast on my TV but my favorite thing that's happening on the Google assistant is this new thing called shortcuts basically it lets you set up a thing that you ask Google for all the time and automate it with your own custom keyword so you just type in the custom keyword that you want and then you type in the long action that you want and it just works so for example if you want to watch youtube videos all the time instead of saying okay google watch verge on youtube on my TV you could just set up a keyword verge me and it works like this urge me alright playing the verge from youtube on living room everybody Shawn and I'm about to do something really stupid okay so once all this stuff coming out well honestly it's gonna be a while the Google assists are the iPhone is available right now but the rest of its coming out in the coming months or maybe not even until the end of the year and honestly that's just how Google rolls they're not very good at the big splashy announcement where they lay out a whole product vision and you can just get it right away what they are very good at is slowly iterating over time when you're not even paying attention that's exactly what they're going to do with the Google assistant for much much more on what is happening here at Google i/o 2017 you should definitely check us out on YouTube we are the verge this isn't what look it's in focus