Posted by Chris Turkstra, Director, Actions on Google
People are using the Assistant every day to get things done more easily, creating lots of opportunities for developers on this quickly growing platform. And we’ve heard from many of you that want easier ways to connect your content across the Assistant.
At I/O, we’re announcing new solutions for Actions on Google that were built specifically with you in mind. Whether you build for web, mobile, or smart home, these new tools will help make your content and services available to people who want to use their voice to get things done.
Help people with their “how to” questions
Every day, people turn to the internet to ask “how to” questions, like how to tie a tie, how to fix a faucet, or how to install a dog door. At I/O, we’re introducing support for How-to markup that lets you power richer and more helpful results in Search and the Assistant.
Adding How-to markup to your pages will enable the page to appear as a rich result on mobile Search and on Google Assistant Smart Displays. This is an incredibly lightweight way for web developers and creators to connect with millions of people, giving them helpful step-by-step instructions with video, images and text. You can start seeing How-to markup results on Search today, and your content will become available on the Smart Displays in the coming months.
Here’s an example where DIY Network added markup to their existing content on the web to provide a more helpful, interactive result on both Google Search and the Assistant:
For content creators that don’t maintain a website, we created a How-to Video Template where video creators can upload a simple spreadsheet with titles, text and timestamps for their YouTube video, and we’ll handle the rest. This is a simple way to transform your existing how-to videos into interactive, step-by-step tutorials across Google Assistant Smart Displays and Android phones.
Check out how REI is getting extra mileage out of their YouTube video:
How-to Video Templates are in developer preview so you can start building today, and your content will become available on Android phones and Smart Displays in the coming months.
Help people quickly get things done with App Actions
If you’re an app developer, people are turning to your apps every day to get things done. And we see people turn to the Assistant every day for a natural way to ask for help via voice. This offers an opportunity to use intents to create voice-based entry points from the Assistant to the right spot in your app.
Last year, we previewed App Actions, a simple mechanism for Android developers that uses intents from the Assistant to deep link to exactly the right spot in your app. At I/O, we are announcing the release of built-in intents for four new App Action categories: Health & Fitness, Finance and Banking, Ridesharing, and Food Ordering. Using these intents, you can integrate with the Assistant in no time.
If I wanted to track my run with Nike Run Club, I could just say “Hey Google, start my run in Nike Run Club” and the app will automatically start tracking my run. Or, let’s say I just finished dinner with my friend Chad and we're splitting the check. I can say "Hey Google, send $15 to Chad on PayPal" and the Assistant takes me right into Paypal, I log in, and all of my information is filled in – all I need to do is hit send.
Each of these integrations were completed in less than a day with the addition of an Actions.xml file that handles the mapping of intents between your app and the Actions platform. You can start building with these new intents today and deploy to Assistant users on Android in the coming months. This is a huge opportunity to offer your fans an effortless way to engage more frequently with your apps.
Take advantage of Smart Displays’ interactive screens
Last year, we saw the introduction of the Smart Display as a new device category. The interactive visual surface opens up many new possibilities for developers.
Today, we’re introducing a developer preview of Interactive Canvas which lets you create full-screen experiences that combine the power of voice, visuals and touch. Canvas works across Smart Displays and Android phones, and it uses open web technologies you’re likely already familiar with, like HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Here’s an example of what you can build when you can leverage the full screen of a Smart Display:
Interactive Canvas is available for building games starting today, and we’ll be adding more categories soon. Visit the Actions Console to be one of the first to try it out.
Enable smart home devices to communicate locally
There are now more than 30,000 connected devices that work with the Assistant across 3,500 brands, and today, we’re excited to announce a new suite of local technologies that are specifically designed to create an even better smart home.
Introducing a preview of the Local Home SDK which enables you to run your smart home code locally on Google Home Speakers and Nest Displays and use its radios to communicate locally with your smart devices. This reduces cloud hops and brings a new level of speed and reliability to the smart home. We’ve been working with some amazing partners including Philips, Wemo, TP-Link, and LIFX on testing this SDK and we’re excited to open it up for all developers next month.
Make setup more seamless
And, through the Local Home SDK, we’re improving the device setup experience by providing users with a seamless setup experience, something we launched in partnership with GE smart lights this past October. So far, people have loved the ability to set up their lights in less than a minute in the Google Home app. We’re now scaling this to more partners, so go here if you’re interested.
Make your devices smart with Assistant Connect
Also, at CES earlier this year we previewed Google Assistant Connect which leverages the Local Home SDK. Assistant Connect enables smart home and appliance developers to easily add Assistant functionality into their devices at low cost. It does this by offloading a lot of work onto the Assistant to complete Actions, display content and respond to commands. We've been hard at work developing the platform along with the first products built on it by Anker, Leviton and Tile. We can't wait to show you more about Assistant Connect later this year.
New device types and traits
For those of you creating Actions for the smart home, we’re also releasing 16 new device types and three new device traits including LockUnlock, ArmDisarm, and Timer. Head over to our developer documentation for the full list of 38 device types and 18 device traits, and check out our sample project on GitHub to start building.
Whether you’re looking to extend the reach of your content, drive more usage in your apps, or build custom Assistant-powered experiences, you now have more tools to do so.
If you want to learn more about how you can start building with these tools, check out our website to get started and our schedule so you can tune in to all of our developer talks that we’ll be hosting throughout the week.
We can’t wait to build together with you!
Posted by Mary Chen, Strategy Lead, Actions on Google
This year at Google I/O, the Actions on Google team is sharing new ways developers of all types can use the Assistant to help users get things done. Whether you’re making Android apps, websites, web content, Actions, or IoT devices, you’ll see how the Assistant can help you engage with users in natural and conversational ways.
Tune in to our announcements during the developer keynote, and then dive deeper with our technical talks. We listed the talks out below by area of interest. Make sure to bookmark them and reserve your seat if you’re attending live, or check back for livestream details if you’re joining us online.
In addition to these sessions, stay tuned for interactive demos and codelabs that you can try at I/O and at home. Follow @ActionsOnGoogle for updates and highlights before, during, and after the festivities.
See you soon!
Update 11:30am PST: Google I/O 2011 has sold out.
(Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog.)
We’ve been counting down the days until Google I/O 2011 and hope that you have been, too. With 91 days, 22 hours and 45 minutes to go, we’re excited to announce that registration is now open at www.google.com/io. Our largest annual developer conference will take place on May 10-11, 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.
The focus of I/O 2011 will be all about the cloud, and feature the latest Google products and technologies including Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Google APIs. There will be many opportunities to meet members of Google’s engineering teams and take deep dives into the technologies with more than 100 technical sessions, roundtables and more. The Developer Sandbox, which we introduced at I/O 2009, will be back, featuring developers from more than 100 companies to demo their apps, share their experiences and exchange ideas.
If you liked our HTML5 countdown, stay tuned for more surprises. We’ll keep you posted on the latest developments for Google I/O 2011 at the website, on Twitter (@Googleio) and Google Buzz. Get your tickets early—last year we sold out in record time!
Registration opens with an Early Bird rate of $450, which applies through April 16 ($550 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $150, which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Learn more and register today at www.google.com/io.
We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!
This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. This guest post is written by Adrian Graham, co-founder of nextstop.com who will give us a demo inside the Developer Sandbox.When building nextstop's HTML5 mobile app, we were able to leverage a powerful combination of HTML5 and Google API's to build a mobile web experience that we believe rivals what we could have built natively. For more on our mobile app, check out this post -- here we will just focus on the technologies that made this experience possible.Lately HTML5's video features have gotten a lot of attention, but it's three other HTML5 features that we've found most useful for mobile web development.1. Prefetching using LocalStorage: It's no secret that mobile data networks are slow but by putting a bit of thought into what users will tap on next, and prefetching that data in the background you can build a dramatically faster user experience. It's possible to do limited forms of prefetching using plain old JavaScript, but using the localStorage key/value storage built into HTML5, we're able to store much more data and therefore prefetch more aggressively.If you're using a recent version of Chrome or Safari or on an iPhone 3 or Android 2 phone and want a sense of what prefetching feels like, try clicking the left and right arrows here (you can ignore the warning you will see in Chrome and Safari).2. Geolocation: Using the geolocation features built into HTML5 (and available on iPhone 3 and Android 2), we're able to connect you with local information based on the GPS in your phone, so all you have to do is launch the app to see nearby recommendations. I wish it were a bit faster, but it sure beats entering an address or zip code -- and it's super easy to hook into as a developer.
3. App Caching: The last HTML5 feature that we heavily rely on is the application cache. If a cache manifest file is specified, the browser won't re-download files unless the content of the manifest file has been updated. This may not sound like a big deal, but the latency of cellular networks can be long enough that requesting multiple files at startup can slow down your app by 10 or 20 seconds. Ideally, you'd put all your static JavaScript, CSS, and image files in the manifest file, so users never have to wait for them to be downloaded more than once.As excited as we are about HTML5, things get even more interesting when you combine these technologies with Google APIs.1. Google Maps API V3: Google Maps V3 has been rewritten from the ground up to better support modern mobile web browsers, and it shows. We were able to build a map interface into our mobile app that is nearly as full featured as our main site, including support for dynamic updates when the user pans and gestures like pinch to zoom on the iPhone. Coupled with the Geolocation support in HTML5, we can easily show users where they are in relation to the recommendations on the map. A year ago, this would have required writing a fair amount of native code. Today it can be done in the browser and works on both Android 2 and iPhone 3 devices.2. Google Analytics: Since we prefetch most of our content, we end up rendering mobile pages using JavaScript. This makes tracking things like page views a little more tricky than a typical website, since we're not requesting an HTML file for each page view (and the App Cache can further complicate matters). We planned on building a custom mobile analytics system, but we decided to try running Google Analytics in the mobile web browser instead. Using the _trackPageview method (with a URL corresponding to each mobile "page" generated by Javascript) has worked surprisingly well and has had minimal performance impact. Best of all, if you're already using Google Analytics on your main site, you see all your mobile analytics in the same place. This lets you do things like easily compare the time on site for a mobile visitor and a desktop visitor. (Here's one data point if you're wondering whether or not to build a mobile web version of your site: visitors spend over twice as long using our mobile HTML5 app as they do on our website.)3. Google Local Search API: Coupled with HTML5 geolocation, the Google Local Search API becomes even easier to use. For instance, the nextstop app lets users add places that they like to nextstop's database. In a desktop browser, we have no choice but to ask the user to type in some words and do a local search. However, on the phone, we can show users a list of nearby places by passing the local search api the user's current position. More often than not, no typing is required to locate the place you'd like to add.
If you can't already tell, we're pretty excited about the future mobile apps running inside a browser. As mobile web browsers and web APIs continue to evolve, we expect more and more people to hop on the HTML5 bandwagon as a cross-platform way to build powerful mobile apps.We'll be at Google I/O in May and would love for you to stop by our demo station in the Developer Sandbox and share any questions, tips, or tricks you have related to HTML5 mobile development. And in the meantime, if you have a great idea for an HTML5 app based on nextstop's data, we encourage you to check out our API.
If you’re attending Google I/O next month, you’ve likely taken a gander at this year’s sessions and made a mental note of ones you’d like to attend. (Or if you’re like Julio Menendez, you’ve already made a list)
We’ve just posted our session schedule so you can now start planning out your two days at I/O. We’ve also got a few more things in the works to help you plan your agenda, including:
Session agenda builder to create a customized agenda you can port to your personal calendar. (Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook)
Google I/O Android app you can download to your Android device so you can easily reference the I/O schedule, star sessions, look at a map of the venue, and find other event info while you’re walking around Moscone West.
Google Wave will be in full force at I/O as a channel for discussion and live notes during I/O. Stay tuned for more information on how to use Wave at the event.
We’ll let you know as these agenda planning features go live. Be sure to check @googleio for the latest updates.
In addition, we’ve also posted our Office Hours schedule. Google engineers will be on hand to answer any questions you may have about the products and technologies featured at I/O. We’ll be holding office hours for Android, App Engine, Chrome, Closure Compiler / Closure Library, Enterprise, Developer Docs, Geo, Go, Google APIs, Google Project Hosting, GWT, Social Web, and Wave.
24 days left until I/O - let the countdown begin!
Posted by Christine Tsai, Google Developer Team
Ignite will be at this year’s Google I/O! Last year, we had talks on big data, cartography and DIY devices -- a "typical" Ignite line-up. This year, our line-up includes folks like Cheezburger CEO, Ben Huh, and digital artist, Aaron Koblin. However, we also want you! We want to hear your cool ideas, hacks, how-to's, and war stories.
Each Ignite talk is 5 minutes long -- with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide (they auto-advance) -- and I'll be hosting the talk at I/O. If you’re not sure what to talk about, watch Scott Berkun's excellent How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk.
Submit your talk by March 31st, and we’ll announce the selected speakers on April 3rd. Those who are chosen to give an Ignite talk will receive a free ticket to Google I/O.
If you need further inspiration, you can watch any of the hundreds of Ignite videos at Ignite Show.
By Brady Forrest, O'Reilly/Ignite
@brady
