Google Assistant has been recently updated to include 15 new, useful actions. Actions are voice-only commands, like Skills are for Alexa. In the case of Amazon’s intelligent assistant, users can browse third party apps via a dedicated website, but when it comes to the Assistant, Google itself approves and enables skills its cloud servers and from there, users can access them.
Some of these new actions include Chefling (which was already available for Alexa) which helps users keep track of what’s in their fridge, suggests recipes based on the available ingredients and provides alerts when certain grocery items are about to expire. The option of asking Google Assistant to add grocery items to a Google Keep shopping list was already available.
Chiefling isn’t the only foodie-friendly action that has been recently added. Users of Google Assistant, also welcome Wine Guide, Beer Guide and Food Network.
Moving along, there’s also an action that allows users to start, stop and pause cleaning sessions with a Neato robot vacuum cleaner. And if you’re a fan of movies, the Movie Maestro can quickly deliver the IMBD rating of the movie you’re about to watch. With Racing Results users can get horse race results from all over the UK, United States, France and Ireland.
Weirdly enough there’s an action which gives you quotes by Jaden Smith. The action was developed by a 16-year-old who considers Will Smith’s 18-year-old son highly inspirational. He also developed another action called Computer Builder, which provides users with a roundup of building a computer basics.
Sure, if you compare the capabilities of the Google Assistant with the ones of Amazon Alexa, you’ll notice the former is a lot more limited. However, it’s not really fair to make a comparison between them, since the Google Assistant was only opened to developers in late 2016, while Alexa has a head start of 18 months.
During this time, Amazon aggressively pushed the service to developers. The strategy proved fruitful, since Alexa users now have up to 10,000 skills to take advantage of. But the Google Assistant will catch up eventually.
Of course it’s fair to compare Google Assistant and Alexa. They are direct competitors and as consumers we don’t have a responsibility to take into account which one has had a larger head start. We certainly can factor that in, but since we buy products for our own personal use it is perfectly fair to compare the two. What a ridiculous statement.