Google Assistant has become a very useful tool on Android devices, but it’s never really been available on Windows. In fact it’s never really been available on any other platform other than Android outside of iOS and Chrome OS.
That’s about to change though with an unofficial tool that a clever developer has created to make such a thing possible. To reiterate though, this is not an official release of Google Assistant for Windows by Google.
While it might not make a huge difference, as most everything looks to be functioning correctly, there are likely to be missing features and it may not get the same amount of support as it would if it were an official Google release.
The Google Assistant tool supports Windows, macOS, and Linux
Even if you’re not on Windows, you can still get Google Assistant on your computer if you run a macOS or Linux machine. Because this unofficial tool supports all three.
It seems that a fair amount of the more basic features work pretty well. So if you simply want it for turning on lights or asking questions about weather and such, it should work just fine. But it reportedly won’t support some of the complex features that a proper Google Assistant device would, like routines.
Routines of course are the feature that allows Google Assistant to control a number of different things when you utter a single command. Like turning on the lights, upping the thermostat, and starting your coffee maker all at the same time.
These more advanced features could very well be implemented with the tool down the line. But as of right now it doesn’t seem like they’re available. So that’s something to keep in mind if you’re at all interested in checking this out for yourself.
There’s a lot of setup involved to get things working
The other caveat is that there seems to be quite a bit of setup involved. So this probably isn’t something to attempt if you’re not ok with going through a lot of technical steps.
If that doesn’t bother you, you can grab all the necessary files from GitHub and get started. There is a set of instructions at the GitHub page to get everything going as well, but there may still be some steps that require knowledge of software or tools that aren’t familiar.
With that said, this is still Google Assistant on your PC that’s not running on Chrome OS. And that’s a marvel in itself.