Welcome to the Future – Google Virtual Assistant your, Android Personal Assistant

Google released the Google Virtual Assistant with their flagship Google Pixel on 20th October 2016 against their rivals Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa. Google Virtual Assistant was first unveiled at Google I/O and now Google Assistant comes along with their latest Android Nougat to almost all Android devices as an Android personal assistant. The application Google Assistant is also integrated into Google Home and Android Wear devices there for your virtual assistant stays with you all the time.

Google Assistant is like an extension or upgrade of Google Now. Google Now was a simple voice-controlled search engine extension of Google search. With google assistant, you can not only search online but control functions of your phone as well.

What can Google Assistant Do?

Although there are tons of features hidden inside this machine learning powered tool created by Google but here are some of the most useful ones.

Find Answers

Find Answers: Google Assistant has the power of the largest search engine in the world with it and with Google’s Natural Language Processing power, google assistant can understand any kind of question and answer accordingly. You can answer questions like What time is it in New York? When is Valentine’s Day? When is my Brother’s birthday? Google Assistant would understand and provide you with answers. If the assistant can not find a relevant answer, it searches the web for potential answers and displays them on your screen.

Play Music

Play Music: Google Assistant has the power to play music locally as well as online. You can use generic terms like Play some music and according to your preferences, google assistant would play music. You can say Listen to Linkin Park on Spotify and it would play Linkin Park songs via Spotify. If you are in the mood to workout, you may ask google assistant to play workout music.

Set Reminders and Alarms

Set Reminders and Alarms: Google Assistant can set reminders and alarms with ease. You can use normal English sentences like remind me to take the trash out at 7 pm, or remember to book tickets for a movie, etc. Google Assistant can understand billions of English sentences with ease now and it gets smarter day by day.

Weather

Weather: You can check for weather of course and google assistant understands English really well, you can ask how’s the weather directly. You can even ask questions like will I be needing an umbrella tomorrow? Yes, google assistant is that smart.

Get Information

Get Information: You can get sports results, restaurants nearby, places nearby, travel information, translations, timers, personal stuff, etc.
Integrated with Google Apps: Google Assistant is directly linked to Google apps like Gmail, Maps, Waze, and Google App. And due to this you don’t miss any appointment and use one app for all your work.

Have Fun

Have Fun: Getting Bored? play with google assistant. Just say I’m bored and google assistant would entertain you. You can play games, get jokes, quotes, etc.
Google Assistant is constantly evolving and Google has been adding brand new features to this incredible development. Recently, Google Assistant got an update in which the user can now interact with their text messages as well. Assistant can read your text messages aloud and allow you to reply to them as well.

We just hope they integrate more and more features into this personal assistant including complete control of google photos app on android. Google Photos app is already smart as it can now recognize, places, faces, and many more. But it would be cool to see Google virtual assistant assisting in other standalone apps as well and become the android personal assistant we need it to be.