The Google Assistant SDK Developer Preview is now live, which means that developers will now have access to the tools that will allow them to integrate Google Assistant with whatever hardware they choose. As Google describes it developers will be able to build their own hardware and incorporate Google Assistant into it so they can interact with it in the same way they would do so with Google Home or Google Assistant on smartphones. This is just the beginning stages, but it’s a huge step forward in getting Google Assistant to reach more people and in helping to expand its capabilities.
Now with the SDK available the possibilities of what developers could build with Google Assistant as an included feature are vast. The obvious options would be more speakers that offer similar capabilities to Google Home and the Amazon Echo, but it doesn’t have to be limited to just these types of hardware products. One example that was dreamt up by Google and a company called Deeplocal is a robotic mocktail mixer with Google Assistant built-in so that you could speak to it and have it make your favorite mixed drink. You can view how this works in the second video below just to give you a visual idea of the capabilities, but the gist of it is that a glass with ice in it is put under the spout of the robotic drink mixer, is then told to make a Sunrise Cooler, and a few seconds later the drink is ready to go, sans garnish.
If this particular project sounds like something you’d like to build yourself, Deeplocal is even providing a more detailed description of the product, and their documentation on building it is hosted over on Github, so everything that’s needed is provided. To get started with the SDK developers are encouraged to watch Google’s introduction video which only takes a few minutes, and Google is further encouraging anyone who wants to build a commercial product with Google Assistant built-in to contact them about the possibilities. It was initially expected that Google would be releasing the Google Assistant SDK to developers in December of last year but instead had only made the Actions on Google available at that time, so this release is a bit behind in that regard, but now that it’s here developers will have plenty to do to keep them busy.