Google has started rolling out Continued Conversations to smart displays that run the Google Assistant.
Starting today, you’ll be able to continue talking to Google on your Google Home Hub or any other smart display, without needing to say the trigger phrase “OK Google” over and over again. This is a feature that has been available for some time on its smart speakers like the Google Home. But it’s good to see it now available on smart displays now, especially considering these are becoming the next big thing in the world of digital voice assistants.
Continued Conversations allows you to ask Google Assistant a question, it’ll then answer you, and you’ll be able to ask follow up questions, without having to say the trigger phrase again. This will result in Google Assistant being a bit “slower” because it is waiting to see if you are finished talking, before answering your question.
This is a setting that you are going to need to enable on your Google Home Hub or Lenovo Smart display (or whichever smart display you happen to have). You’ll need to go into your Google Home app and go to Settings, then go to Preferences. Flip the switch for Continued Conversations and you should be good to go. It’s important to note that this will turn it on for all of your Google Home devices on your account. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to turn it on for just a your smart display or just your smart speaker, it’s all or nothing.
It’s also worth noting that Continued Conversations is currently only available in English. It is available outside of the US, but you do need to use US English to get it to work. That should hopefully change in the future.
Since Google rolled out Continued Conversations on the Google Home last year, many have praised the feature. Making it much more human-like to interact with the Google Assistant. Instead of having to continually get its attention, you can keep talking to it, and asking it questions, like you would someone that is standing in front of you. Imagine you asked the Google Assistant who is the President of the United States. Google Assistant would tell you, then you could follow up with “how tall is he?” and it would know you mean Trump. It makes things pretty easy to use, and more human-like, which is what Google is going for these days.
Google is continuing to roll out new features for the Google Assistant on all of its platforms. Whether that is the smartphone, smart speakers, smart displays, or even your TV. Google wants the Assistant everywhere, and it is doing a pretty good job of getting it just about everywhere so far. It hasn’t gotten to feature parity everywhere just yet – as you can see here, it was several months before Continued Conversations made the jump to smart displays, after launching on smart speakers. But that should come with time, hopefully sooner rather than later.