Posted by Ilya Gelfenbeyn, Head of the Google Assistant Investments program
Last year, we announced the Google Assistant Investments program with the goal to help pioneering startups bring their ideas to life in the digital assistant ecosystem. Not only have we invested in some really great startups, we've also been working closely with these companies to make their services available to more users.
We're excited to be back to announce five new portfolio companies and catch up on the progress some of them have made this past year. With the next batch of investments, we're helping companies explore how digital assistants can improve the hospitality, insurance, fashion and education industries, and we have something for sports fans too.
First up, AskPorter. This London-based team was founded to make managing spaces simple, providing every property manager and occupant with a digital personal assistant. AskPorter is an AI-powered property management platform with a digital assistant called Porter. Porter assists and takes care of all aspects of property management such as guiding inspections arranging viewings, troubleshooting maintenance issues and chasing payments.
GradeSlam is an on-demand, chat-based, personalized learning and tutoring service available across all subject areas. Sessions are conducted via chat, creating a learning environment that allows students to interact freely and personally with qualified educators. The Montreal-based team is already used by more than 150,000 students, teachers and administrators.
Aiva Health puts smart speakers in hospitals and senior communities to reduce response times and improve satisfaction for patients, seniors, and caregivers alike. Aiva understands patient requests and routes them to the most appropriate caregiver so they can respond instantly via their mobile app. The Aiva platform provides centralized IoT management, powering Smart Hospitals and Smart Communities.
StyleHacks (formerly Maison Me) was founded with a goal of empowering people to take back control of their style and wardrobe. With a conversational interface and personalized AI-powered recommendations, they're helping people live their most stylish lives. The team has already launched the "StyleHacks" Action for phones and Smart Displays in December 2018, helping people decide what to wear by providing personalized recommendations based on the weather and preferences. And in the next few months, StyleHacks will also be able to help you shop for clothes you will actually wear. Just ask StyleHacks what to wear today
StatMuse turns the biggest sports stars into your own personal sports commentator. Powered by the personalities of more than 25 sports superstars including Peyton Manning, Jerry Rice and Scott Van Pelt, fans can get scores, stats and recaps for the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB dating back to 1876. To try it out, just say, "Hey Google, talk to StatMuse."
It's been almost a year since we launched the Investments program and we're happy to see how some of these companies are already using voice to broaden the Google Assistant's capabilities. If you're working on new ways for people to use their voice to get things done, or building new hardware devices for digital assistants, we'd like to hear from you.
Posted by Francisco Solsona, Developer Relations Manager, Google Hispanoamerica
The Latin American startup ecosystem is thriving. Many success stories from the region have served as inspiration for entrepreneurs and investors alike. To build upon this momentum, we believe it is important to continue supporting programs for entrepreneurs that are using technology to solve some of the region's biggest challenges.
That's why we are happy to announce Launchpad Accelerator Mexico, a program focused on helping startups throughout Latin America create attractive, scalable, and impactful products and technologies. This program has existed in different parts of the world such as Israel, Tel Aviv; Nigeria, Lagos; Brazil, São Paulo; and now comes to Mexico City thanks to our partnership with Centraal, a thriving co-working space.
Access to new technologies and technical experts is essential to guarantee startup success. With Google Cloud serving as backbone for today's global startups, Launchpad Accelerator Mexico will help startups overcome technological challenges in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Android, and web solutions.
The inaugural program will last three months and will offer technical support on an initially defined, high impact project. The cohort of entrepreneurs will have access to a group of mentors from Google and other industry experts.
This program is for your startup if:
Registration for the inaugural class is now open and startups can apply using this form. Registration remains open until March 15. The selected startups will be announced on March 21 and will start working with Google on April 29, 2019.
Posted by Ben Fried, VP, CIO, & Chief Domains Enthusiast
Developers, designers, writers and architects: you built the web. You make it possible for the billions of people online today to do what they do. Have you ever tried to register your preferred domain name, only to find out it's not available? Today, Google Registry is announcing .dev, a brand new top-level domain (TLD) that's dedicated to developers and technology. We hope .dev will be a new home for you to build your communities, learn the latest tech and showcase your projects—all with a perfect domain name.
Check out what some companies, both big and small, are doing on .dev:
Like our recent launches for .app and .page, this new domain will be secure by default because it requires HTTPS to connect to all .dev websites. This protects people who visit your site against ad malware and tracking injection by internet service providers, and from spying when using open WiFi networks. With every .dev website that's launched, you help move the web to an HTTPS-everywhere future.
Starting today at 8:00 a.m. PT and through February 28, .dev domains are available to register as part of our Early Access Program, where you can secure your desired domains for an additional fee. The fee decreases according to a daily schedule. Beginning on February 28, .dev domains will be available at a base annual price through your registrar of choice. To find out pricing from our participating partners, visit get.dev.
Google has already started using .dev for some of our own projects, like web.dev and opensource.dev. Visit get.dev to see what companies like Mozilla, Netflix, Glitch, Stripe, JetBrains and more are doing on .dev and get your own domain through one of our registrar partners. We look forward to seeing what you create on .dev!
Posted by Evan Hardesty Parker, Software Engineer
ARCore and Sceneform give developers simple yet powerful tools for creating augmented reality (AR) experiences. In our last update (version 1.6) we focused on making virtual objects appear more realistic within a scene. In version 1.7, we're focusing on creative elements like AR selfies and animation as well as helping you improve the core user experience in your apps.
Example of 3D face mesh application
ARCore's new Augmented Faces API (available on the front-facing camera) offers a high quality, 468-point 3D mesh that lets users attach fun effects to their faces. From animated masks, glasses, and virtual hats to skin retouching, the mesh provides coordinates and region specific anchors that make it possible to add these delightful effects.
You can get started in Unity or Sceneform by creating an ARCore session with the "front-facing camera" and Augmented Faces "mesh" mode enabled. Note that other AR features such as plane detection aren't currently available when using the front-facing camera. AugmentedFace extends Trackable, so faces are detected and updated just like planes, Augmented Images, and other trackables.
AugmentedFace
Trackable
// Create ARCore session that support Augmented Faces for use in Sceneform. public Session createAugmentedFacesSession(Activity activity) throws UnavailableException { // Use the front-facing (selfie) camera. Session session = new Session(activity, EnumSet.of(Session.Feature.FRONT_CAMERA)); // Enable Augmented Faces. Config config = session.getConfig(); config.setAugmentedFaceMode(Config.AugmentedFaceMode.MESH3D); session.configure(config); return session; }
Another way version 1.7 expands the AR creative canvas is by letting your objects dance, jump, spin and move around with support for animations in Sceneform. To start an animation, initialize a ModelAnimator (an extension of the existing Android animation support) with animation data from your ModelRenderable.
ModelAnimator
ModelRenderable
void startDancing(ModelRenderable andyRenderable) { AnimationData data = andyRenderable.getAnimationData("andy_dancing"); animator = new ModelAnimator(data, andyRenderable); animator.start(); }
In ARCore version 1.7 we also focused on helping you improve your user experience with a simplified workflow. We've integrated "ARCore Elements" -- a set of common AR UI components that have been validated with user testing -- into the ARCore SDK for Unity. You can use ARCore Elements to insert AR interactive patterns in your apps without having to reinvent the wheel. ARCore Elements also makes it easier to follow Google's recommended AR UX guidelines.
ARCore Elements includes two AR UI components that are especially useful:
We plan to add more to ARCore Elements over time. You can download the ARCore Elements app available in the Google Play Store to learn more.
ARCore version 1.7 also includes UX enhancements for the smartphone camera -- specifically, the experience of switching in and out of AR mode. Shared Camera access in the ARCore SDK for Java lets users pause an AR experience, access the camera, and jump back in. This can be particularly helpful if users want to take a picture of the action in your app.
More details are available in the Shared Camera developer documentation and Java sample.
For AR experiences to capture users' imaginations they need to be both immersive and easily accessible. With tools for adding AR selfies, animation, and UI enhancements, ARCore version 1.7 can help with both these objectives.
You can learn more about these new updates on our ARCore developer website.
Posted by Adam Dawes
We're always looking for ways to improve user security both on Google and on your applications. That's why we've long invested in Google Sign In, so that users can extend all the security protections of their Google Account to your app.
Historically, there has been a critical shortcoming of all single sign in solutions. In the rare case that a user's Google Account falls prey to an attacker, the attacker can also gain and maintain access to your app via Google Sign In. That's why we're super excited to open a new feature of Google Sign In, Cross Account Protection (CAP), to developers.
CAP is a simple protocol that enables two apps to send and receive security notifications about a common user. It supports a standardized set of events including: account hijacked, account disabled, when Google terminates all the user's sessions, and when we lock an account to force the user to change their password. We also have a signal if we detect that an account could be causing abuse on your system.
CAP is built on several newly created Internet Standards, Risk and Incident Sharing and Coordination (RISC) and Security Events, that we developed with the community at the OpenID Foundation and IETF. This means that you should only have to build one implementation to be able to receive signals from multiple identity providers.
Google is now ready to send security events to your app for any user who has previously logged in using Google Sign In. If you've already integrated Google Sign In into your service, you can start receiving signals in just three easy steps:
If you already use Google Sign In, please get started by checking out our developer docs. If you don't use Google Sign In, CAP is another great reason to do so to improve the security of your users. Developers using Firebase Authentication or Google Cloud Identity for Customers & Partners have CAP configured automatically - there's nothing you need to do. You can also post questions on Stack Overflow with the #SecEvents tag.
Posted by Amit Ganesh, VP Engineering & Dan McGrath, Product Manager
As modern application development moves away from managing infrastructure and toward a serverless future, we're pleased to announce the general availability of Cloud Firestore, our serverless, NoSQL document database. We're also making it available in 10 new locations to complement the existing three, announcing a significant price reduction for regional instances, and enabling integration with Stackdriver for monitoring.
Cloud Firestore is a fully managed, cloud-native database that makes it simple to store, sync, and query data for web, mobile, and IoT applications. It focuses on providing a great developer experience and simplifying app development with live synchronization, offline support, and ACID transactions across hundreds of documents and collections. Cloud Firestore is integrated with both Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Firebase, Google's mobile development platform. You can learn more about how Cloud Firestore works with Firebase here. With Cloud Firestore, you can build applications that move swiftly into production, thanks to flexible database security rules, real-time capabilities, and a completely hands-off auto-scaling infrastructure.
Cloud Firestore does more than just core database tasks. It's designed to be a complete data backend that handles security and authorization, infrastructure, edge data storage, and synchronization. Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Firebase Auth are built in to help make sure your application and its data remain secure. Tight integration with Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, and Firebase's SDK accelerates and simplifies building end-to-end serverless applications. You can also easily export data into BigQuery for powerful analysis, post-processing of data, and machine learning.
Building with Cloud Firestore means your app can seamlessly transition from online to offline and back at the edge of connectivity. This helps lead to simpler code and fewer errors. You can serve rich user experiences and push data updates to more than a million concurrent clients, all without having to set up and maintain infrastructure. Cloud Firestore's strong consistency guarantee helps to minimize application code complexity and reduces bugs. A client-side application can even talk directly to the database, because enterprise-grade security is built right in. Unlike most other NoSQL databases, Cloud Firestore supports modifying up to 500 collections and documents in a single transaction while still automatically scaling to exactly match your workload.
What's new with Cloud Firestore
Cloud Firestore is now available in 13 regions.
As the next generation of Cloud Datastore, Cloud Firestore is compatible with all Cloud Datastore APIs and client libraries. Existing Cloud Datastore users will be live-upgraded to Cloud Firestore automatically later in 2019. You can learn more about this upgrade here.
Adding flexibility and scalability across industries
Cloud Firestore is already changing the way companies build apps in media, IoT, mobility, digital agencies, real estate, and many others. The unifying themes among these workloads include: the need for mobility even when connectivity lapses, scalability for many users, and the ability to move quickly from prototype to production. Here are a few of the stories we've heard from Cloud Firestore users.
When opportunity strikes...
In the highly competitive world of shared, on-demand personal mobility via cars, bikes, and scooters, the ability to deliver a differentiated user experience, iterate rapidly, and scale are critical. The prize is huge. Skip provides a scooter-sharing system where shipping fast can have a big impact. Mike Wadhera, CTO and Co-founder, says, "Cloud Firestore has enabled our engineering and product teams to ship at the clock-speed of a startup while leveraging Google-scale infrastructure. We're delighted to see continued investment in Firebase and the broader GCP platform."
Another Cloud Firestore user, digital consultancy The Nerdery, has to deliver high-quality results in a short period of time, often needing to integrate with existing third-party data sources. They can't build up and tear down complicated, expensive infrastructure for every client app they create. "Cloud Firestore was a great fit for the web and mobile applications we built because it required a solution to keep 40,000-plus users apprised of real-time data updates," says Jansen Price, Principal Software Architect. "The reliability and speed of Cloud Firestore coupled with its real-time capabilities allowed us to deliver a great product for the Google Cloud Next conferences."
Reliable information delivery
Incident response company Now IMS uses real-time data to keep citizens safe in crowded places, where cell service can get spotty when demand is high. "As an incident management company, real-time and offline capabilities are paramount to our customers," says John Rodkey, Co-founder. "Cloud Firestore, along with the Firebase Javascript SDK, provides us with these capabilities out of the box. This new 100% serverless architecture on Google Cloud enables us to focus on rapid application development to meet our customers' needs instead of worrying about infrastructure or server management like with our previous cloud."
Regardless of the app, users want the latest information right away, without having to click refresh. The QuintoAndar mobile application connects tenants and landlords in Brazil for easier apartment rentals. "Being able to deliver constantly changing information to our customers allows us to provide a truly engaging experience. Cloud Firestore enables us to do this without additional infrastructure and allows us to focus on the core challenges of our business," says Guilherme Salerno, Engineering Manager at QuintoAndar.
Real-time, responsive apps, happy users
Famed broadsheet and media company The Telegraph uses Cloud Firestore so registered users can easily discover and engage with relevant content. The Telegraph wanted to make the user experience better without having to become infrastructure experts in serving and managing data to millions of concurrent connections. "Cloud Firestore allowed us to build a real-time personalized news feed, keeping readers informed with synchronized content state across all of their devices," says Alex Mansfield-Scaddan, Solution Architect. "It allowed The Telegraph engineering teams to focus on improving engagement with our customers, rather than becoming real-time database and infrastructure experts."
On the other side of the Atlantic, The New York Times used Cloud Firestore to build a feature in The Times' mobile app to send push notifications updated in real time for the 2018 Winter Olympics. In previous approaches to this feature, scaling had been a challenge. The team needed to track each reader's history of interactions in order to provide tailored content for particular events or sports. Cloud Firestore allowed them to query data dynamically, then send the real-time updates to readers. The team was able to send more targeted content faster.
Delivering powerful edge storage for IoT devices
Athlete testing technology company Hawkin Dynamics was an early, pre-beta adopter of Cloud Firestore. Their pressure pads are used by many professional sports teams to measure and track athlete performance. In the fast-paced, high-stakes world of professional sports, athletes can't wait around for devices to connect or results to calculate. They demand instant answers even if the WiFi is temporarily down. Hawkin Dynamics uses Cloud Firestore to bring real-time data to athletes through their app dashboard, shown below.
"Our core mission at Hawkin Dynamics is to help coaches make informed decisions regarding their athletes through the use of actionable data. With real-time updates, our users can get the data they need to adjust an athlete's training on a moment-by-moment basis," says Chris Wales, CTO. "By utilizing the powerful querying ability of Cloud Firestore, we can provide them the insights they need to evaluate the overall efficacy of their programs. The close integrations with Cloud Functions and the other Firebase products have allowed us to constantly improve on our product and stay responsive to our customers' needs. In an industry that is rapidly changing, the flexibility afforded to us by Cloud Firestore in extending our applications has allowed us to stay ahead of the game."
Getting started with Cloud Firestore
We've heard from many of you that Cloud Firestore is helping solve some of your most timely development challenges by simplifying real-time data and data synchronization, eliminating server-side code, and providing flexible yet secure database authentication rules. This reflects the state of the cloud app market, where developers are exploring lots of options to help them build better and faster while also providing modern user experiences. This glance at Stack Overflow questions gives a good picture of some of these trends, where Cloud Firestore is a hot topic among cloud databases.
Source: StackExchange
We've seen close to a million Cloud Firestore databases created since its beta launch. The platform is designed to serve databases ranging in size from kilobytes to multiple petabytes of data. Even a single application running on Cloud Firestore is delivering more than 1 million real-time updates per second to users. These apps are just the beginning. To learn more about serverless application development, take a look through the archive of the recent application development digital conference.
We'd love to hear from you, and we can't wait to see what you build next. Try Cloud Firestore today for your apps.
Posted by Jeremy Neuner, Head of Launchpad San Francisco
Google's Developer Relations team is opening a new innovation space at 543 Howard St. in San Francisco. By working with more than a million developers and startups we've found that something unique happens when we interact with our communities face-to-face. Talks, meetups, workshops, sprints, bootcamps, and social events not only provide opportunities for Googlers to authentically connect with users but also build trust and credibility as we form connections on a more personal level.
The space will be the US home of Launchpad, Google's startup acceleration engine. Founded in 2016 the Launchpad Accelerator has seen 13 cohorts graduate across 5 continents, reaching 241 startups. In 2019, the program will bring together top Google talent with startups from around the world who are working on AI-enabled solutions to problems in financial technology, healthcare, and social good.
In addition to its focus on startups, the Google innovation space will offer programming designed specifically for developers and designers throughout the year. For example, in tandem with the rapid growth of Google Cloud Platform, we will host hands-on sessions on Kubernetes, big data and AI architectures with Google engineers and industry experts.
Finally, we want the space to serve as a hub for industry-wide Developer Relations' diversity and inclusion efforts. And we will partner with groups such as Manos Accelerator and dev/Mission to bring the latest technologies to underserved groups.
We designed the space with a single credo in mind, "We must continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down." The flexible design of the space ensures our community has a place to learn, experiment, and grow.
For more information about our new innovation space, click here.
Posted by Erik Pasternak, Blockly team Manager
Coding is a powerful tool for creating, expressing, and understanding ideas. That's why our goal is to make coding available to kids around the world. It's also why, in late 2015, we decided to collaborate with the MIT Media Lab on the redesign of the programming blocks for their newest version of Scratch.
Left: Scratch 2.0's code rendering. Right: Scratch 3.0's new code rendering.
Scratch is a block-based programming language used by millions of kids worldwide to create and share animations, stories, and games. We've always been inspired by Scratch, and CS First, our CS education program for students, provides lessons for educators to teach coding using Scratch.
But Scratch 2.0 was built on Flash, and by 2015, it became clear that the code needed a JavaScript rewrite. This would be an enormous task, so having good code libraries would be key.
And this is where the Blockly team at Google came in. Blockly is a library that makes it easy for developers to add block programming to their apps. By 2015, many of the web's visual coding activities were built on Blockly, through groups like Code.org, App Inventor, and MakeCode. Today, Blockly is used by thousands of developers to build apps that teach kids how to code.
One of our Product Managers, Champika (who earned her master's degree in Scratch's lab at MIT) believed Blockly could be a great fit for Scratch 3.0. She brought together the Scratch and Google Blockly teams for informal discussions. It was clear the teams had shared goals and values and could learn a lot from one another. Blockly brought a flexible, powerful library to the table, and the Scratch team brought decades of experience designing for kids.
Champika and the Blockly team together at I/O Youth, 2016.
Those early meetings kicked off three years of fun (and hard work) that led to the new blocks you see in Scratch 3.0. The two teams regularly traveled across the country to work together in person, trade puns, and pore over designs. Scratch's feedback and design drove lots of new features in Blockly, and Blockly made those features available to all developers.
On January 2nd, Scratch 3.0 launched with all of the code open source and publicly developed. At Google, we created two coding activities that showcase this code base. The first was Code a Snowflake, which was used by millions of kids as part of Google's Santa Tracker. The second was a Google Doodle that celebrated 50 years of kids coding and gave millions of people their first experience with block programming. As an added bonus, we worked with Scratch to include an extension for Google Translate in Scratch 3.0.
With Scratch 3.0, even more people are programming with blocks built on Blockly. We're excited to see what else you, our developers, will build on Blockly.
Update: This posting was updated on January 28 with new information about OAuth scopes.
As part of the sunset of Google+ for consumers, we will be shutting down all Google+ APIs on March 7, 2019. This will be a progressive shutdown beginning in late January, so we are advising all developers reliant on the Google+ APIs that calls to those APIs may start to intermittently fail as early as January 28, 2019.
On or around December 20, 2018, affected developers should also receive an email listing recently used Google+ API methods in their projects. Whether or not an email is received, we strongly encourage developers to search for and remove any dependencies on Google+ APIs from their applications.
The most commonly used APIs that are being shut down include:
As part of these changes:
Google+ integrations for web or mobile apps are also being shut down. Please see this additional notice.
While we're sunsetting Google+ for consumers, we're investing in Google+ for enterprise organizations. They can expect a new look and new features -- more information is available in our blog post.
Posted by Julia Chen Davidson, Head of Partner Marketing, Google Home
We recently launched the Google Home Hub, the first ever Made by Google smart speaker with a screen, and we knew that a lot of you would want to put these helpful devices in the kitchen—perhaps the most productive room in the house. With the Google Assistant built-in to the Home Hub, you can use your voice—or your hands—to multitask during meal time. You can manage your shopping list, map out your family calendar, create reminders for the week, and even help your kids out with their homework.
To make the Google Assistant on the Home Hub even more helpful in the kitchen, we partnered with BuzzFeed's Tasty, the largest social food network in the world, to bring 2,000 of their step-by-step tutorials to the Assistant, adding to the tens of thousands of recipes already available. With Tasty on the Home Hub, you can search for recipes based on the ingredients you have in the pantry, your dietary restrictions, cuisine preferences and more. And once you find the right recipe, Tasty will walk you through each recipe with instructional videos and step-by-step guidance.
Tasty's Action shows off how brands can combine voice with visuals to create next-generation experiences for our smart homes. We asked Sami Simon, Product Manager for BuzzFeed Media Brands, a few questions about building for the Google Assistant and we hope you'll find some inspiration for how you can combine voice and touch for the new category of devices in our homes.
What additive value do you see for your users by building an Action for the Google Assistant that's different from an app or YouTube video series, for example?
We all know that feeling when you have your hands in a bowl of ground meat and you realize you have to tap the app to go to the next step or unpause the YouTube video you were watching (I can attest to random food smudges all over my phone and computer for this very reason!).
With our Action, people can use the Google Assistant to get a helping hand while cooking, navigating a Tasty recipe just by using their voice. Without having to break the flow of rolling out dough or chopping an onion, we can now guide people on what to expect next in their cooking process. What's more, with the Google Home Hub, which has the added bonus of a display screen, home chefs can also quickly glance at the video instructions for extra guidance.
The Google Home Hub gives users all of Google, in their home, at a glance. What advantages do you see for Tasty in being a part of voice-enabled devices in the home?
The Assistant on the Google Home Hub enhances the Tasty experience in the kitchen, making it easier than ever for home chefs to cook Tasty recipes, either by utilizing voice commands or the screen display. Tasty is already the centerpiece of the kitchen, and with the Google Home Hub integration, we have the opportunity to provide additional value to our audience. For instance, we've introduced features like Clean Out My Fridge where users share their available ingredients and Tasty recommends what to cook. We're so excited that we can seamlessly provide inspiration and coaching to all home chefs and make cooking even more accessible.
How do you think these new devices will shape the future of digital assistance? How did you think through when to use voice and visual components in your Action?
In our day-to-day lives, we don't necessarily think critically about the best way to receive information in a given instance, but this project challenged us to create the optimal cooking experience. Ultimately we designed the Action to be voice-first to harness the power of the Assistant.
We then layered in the supplemental visuals to make the cooking experience even easier and make searching our recipe catalogue more fun. For instance, if you're busy stir frying, all the pertinent information would be read aloud to you, and if you wanted to quickly check what this might look like, we also provide the visual as additional guidance.
Can you elaborate on 1-3 key findings that your team discovered while testing the Action for the Home Hub?
Tasty's lens on cooking is to provide a fun and accessible experience in the kitchen, which we wanted to have come across with the Action. We developed a personality profile for Tasty with the mission of connecting with chefs of all levels, which served as a guide for making decisions about the Action. For instance, once we defined the voice of Tasty, we knew how to keep the dialogue conversational in order to better resonate with our audience.
Additionally, while most people have had some experience with digital assistants, their knowledge of how assistants work and ways that they use them vary wildly from person to person. When we did user testing, we realized that unlike designing UX for a website, there weren't as many common design patterns we could rely on. Keeping this in mind helped us to continuously ensure that our user paths were as clear as possible and that we always provided users support if they got lost or confused.
What are you most excited about for the future of digital assistance and branded experiences there? Where do you foresee this ecosystem going?
I'm really excited for people to discover more use cases we haven't even dreamed of yet. We've thoroughly explored practical applications of the Assistant, so I'm eager to see how we can develop more creative Actions and evolve how we think about digital assistants. As the Assistant will only get smarter and better at predicting people's behavior, I'm looking forward to seeing the growth of helpful and innovative Actions, and applying those to Tasty's mission to make cooking even more accessible.
What's next for Tasty and your Action? What additional opportunities do you foresee for your brand in digital assistance or conversational interfaces?
We are proud of how our Action leverages the Google Assistant to enhance the cooking experience for our audience, and excited for how we can evolve the feature set in the future. The Tasty brand has evolved its videos beyond our popular top-down recipe format. It would be an awesome opportunity to expand our Action to incorporate the full breadth of the Tasty brand, such as our creative long-form programming or extended cooking tutorials, so we can continue helping people feel more comfortable in the kitchen.
To check out Tasty's Action yourself, just say "Hey Google, ask Tasty what I should make for dinner" on your Home Hub or Smart Display. And to learn more about the solutions we have for businesses, take a look at our Assistant Business site to get started building for the Google Assistant.
If you don't have the resources to build in-house, you can also work with our talented partners that have already built Actions for all types of use cases. To make it even easier to find the perfect partner, we recently launched a new website that shows these agencies on a map with more details about how to get in touch. And if you're an agency already building Actions, we'd love to hear from you. Just reach out here and we'll see if we can offer some help along the way!
