Google has launched its 1st major makeover for the Google Assistant on phones, bringing a richer, more interactive interface.
It said in a blog post today that ever since the Google Assistant had debuted, almost half of all interactions with the Assistant included both voice & touch. With this redesign, Google was trying to make the Assistant more “visually assistive” for users, combining voice with touch in a way that gives users the right controls in the right situations.
As part of the Google Assistant makeover, for developers, it’s now become easy to bring better multimodal experiences to life on the phone & other Assistant-enabled devices with screens, including Smart Displays. For brands, said Google, this presents a new opportunity to express ideas through richer visuals.
To get started, you can now add rich responses to customize your Action for visual interfaces. With rich responses you can build visually engaging Actions for your users with a set of plug-and-play visual components for different types of Content. If you’ve already added rich responses to your Action, these will work automatically on the new mobile redesign. For the Google Assistant makeover, here a guidance list on how & when to use visuals in your Action.
Developers interested in knowing more about the Google Assistant makeover can check out the documentation on how to add digital goods & Google Sign-In for Assistant to create personalized experiences for users across devices.
To improve your visual experience for phone users, they may also look at conversation design site, the documentation on different surfaces, & the documentation & sample on how you can use rich responses to build with visual components. You can also test and debug your different types of voice, visual, & multimodal experiences in the Actions simulator.
