Integrating Your Android App with Google Assistant — part1
The next generation is vocal, let’s meet them
--
Intro: The next generation is vocal, let’s meet them
If you have kids, you know it, the future is Voice. Just like the 2000s gen is using touch screen and don’t understand why “older” people use keyboards, the kids born in 2010s and later use heavely voice commands.
They are the ones born with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant first released in 2011. With the rapid progress in the AI field in the last few year, vocal assistants are more accurate than ever. Assistants are not only available on smartphone but on smart-speakers, smart-tv, smart-watch and they are here to stay. If you want to seduce the up-coming generation, your app will need a Vocal Interface.
Thankfully our favourite mobile platform is gifted with the ability of understanding vocal commands 👄
This article will explain how to make your app responsive to Vocal Commands, while the next one will cover the tight integration with Google Assistant using Slices.
Prerequisites
In order to get Google Assistant integration, make sure you have a Google account, a Google PlayStore access with the same account and a test device connected with the same Google Account.
Gradle dependencies
We will need the following 2 packages:
implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-core:19.0.2'
implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-appindexing:20.0.0'
Overview of the Architecture and Flow
They are essentially 3 things that we need to make the app understand vocal commands.
- Define Deeplinks
- Create shortcuts
- Test shortcuts
Defining Deeplinks
Android apps are supporting deeplinks allowing particular feature and activity to be triggered using a…