Posted by Brad Abrams, Product
Manager
Every day, users are discovering new ways the Google Assistant and your apps can
help them get things done. Today we're announcing a set of new features to make
it easier for users to find, interact, and re-engage with your app.
Helping users find your
apps
With more international support and updates to the Google Assistant, it's easier
than ever for users to find your app.
Updates to the app directory: We're adding
what's
new and what's trending sections in the app directory within
the
Assistant experience on your phone. These dynamic sections will constantly
change and evolve, creating more opportunities for your app to be discovered by
users in all supported locales where the Google Assistant and Actions on Google
are available.
We're also introducing autocomplete in the directory's search box, so, if a user
doesn't quite remember the name of your app, it will populate as they type.
New subcategories: We've created subcategories in the
app
directory, so if you click on a category like "Food & Drink", apps are broken
down into additional subcategories, like "Order Food" or "View a Menu." We're
using your app's description and sample invocations to map users' natural search
queries to the new task-based subcategories. The updated labelling taxonomy
improves discovery for your app; it will now surface for users in all relevant
subcategories depending on its various capabilities. This change will help you
communicate to users everything your app can do, and creates new avenues for
your app to be discovered – learn more here.
Implicit discovery: Implicit discovery is when a user
is
connected to your app using contextual queries (e.g., "book an appointment
to fix my bike"), as opposed to calling for your app by name. We've created
a new discovery section of the console to help improve your app's implicit
discovery, providing instructions for creating precise action invocation phrases
so your app will surface even when a user can't remember its name. Go here
to learn more.
Badges for family-friendly apps: We're launching a new
"For
Families" badge on the Google Assistant, designed to help users find apps that
are appropriate for all ages. All existing apps in the Apps for Families program
will get the badge automatically. Learn about how your app can qualify for the
"For Families" badge here.
International support: Users will soon be able to find
your
apps in even more languages because starting today, you can build apps in
Spanish (US, MX and ES), Italian, Portuguese (BR) and English (IN). And in the
UK, developers can now start building apps that have transactional capabilities.
Watch the internationalization video
to learn how to support multiple languages with Actions on Google.
Creating a more interactive user
experience
Helping users find your app is one thing, but making sure they have a
compelling, meaningful experience once they begin talking to your app is equally
important – we're releasing some new features to help:
Speaker to phone transfer: We're launching a new API so
you
can develop experiences that start with the Assistant on voice-activated
speakers like Google Home and can be passed off to users' phones. Need to send a
map or complete a transaction using a phone? Check out the example below and
click here
to learn more.
Build personalized apps: To create a more personal
experience for users, you can now enable your app to remember select information
and preferences. Learn more here.
Better SSML: We recently rolled out an update to the
web
simulator which includes a new SSML audio design experience. We now give you
more options for creating natural, quality dialog using newly supported SSML
tags, including <prosody>, <emphasis>,
<audio> and others. The new tag <par>
is coming soon and lets you add mood and richness, so you can play background
music and ambient sounds while a user is having a conversation with your app. To
help you get started, we've added over 1,000 sounds to the sound
library.Listen to a brief SSML audio experiment that shows off some of the new
features here 🔊.
Cancel event: Today when a user says "cancel" to end
the
conversation, your app never gets a chance to respond with a polite farewell
message. Now you can
get one
last request to your webhook that you can use to clean up your fulfillment logic
and respond to the user before they exit.
Account linking in conversation: Until today, users had
to
link their account to your app at the beginning of the interaction, before they
had a chance to decide whether or not account linking was the right choice. With
the updated AskForSignIn
API, we're giving you the option of prompting users to link their account to
your app at the most
appropriate time of the experience.
Re-engaging with your
users
To keep users coming back to your app, day after day, we're adding some
additional features that you can experiment with – these are available this week
for you to start testing and will roll out to users soon.
Daily updates: At the end of a great interaction with
your
app, a user might want to be notified of similar content from your app every
day. To enable that we will add a suggestion chip prompting the user to sign up
for a daily update. Check out the example below and go to the discovery section
of the console to configure daily
updates.
Push notifications: We're launching a new push
notification
API, enabling your app to push asynchronous updates to users. For the day trader
who's looking for the best time to sell stock options, or the frugal shopper
waiting for the big sale to buy a new pair of shoes, these alerts will show up
as system notifications on the phone (and later to the Assistant on
voice-activated speakers like Google Home).
Directory analytics: To give you more insight into how
users are interacting with your app on the mobile directory so you can continue
improving the experience for users, we've updated the analytics tools in the
console. You will be able to find information about your app's rating, the
number of pageviews, along with the number of conversations that were initiated
from your app directory listing.
Phew! I know that was a lot to cover, but that was only a brief overview of the
updates we've made and we can't wait to see how you'll use these tools to unlock
the Google Assistant's potential in new and creative ways.
