App Actions overview

Key Takeaways

by extending your android application with google assistant your users can launch and complete tasks with your app faster app actions is how developers can integrate google assistant into your android app and is how end users can launch and control android apps with their voice let's take the user journey of ordering a pizza it can be quite a process if your app isn't voice enabled first your user will have to find the app icon in the sea of icons then find in the app where they can start an order then select they want to order a pizza and finally customize your pizza to include the sauces cheeses and toppings they want not too bad but imagine a user being able to say hey google order pizza from example app and the app is automatically open and order started now all they need to do is customize the pizza so much easier app actions allows android developers to add voice commands to their apps to accelerate tasks like these for your users by saying hey google order pizza from example app there's enough contacts to open the example app directly to the order page for a pizza from a user's perspective this might feel magical but you can think of this experience as two parts first is processing the user's input in which you'll be harnessing the power of google's natural language understanding to figure out what your user wants to do in your app the second is fulfillment what you want to present to your user as a response let's go over how it works key concepts and highlight some key features let's break down what is happening with the example of ordering a pizza when a user says hey google order a pizza from example app google assistant will process the user's input using google's nlu and matches an intent from the user speech assistant knows which capabilities you support when your app is uploaded to the play store capabilities represent a generic way for an app to expose external entry points into the app in this example assistant uses a capability that matches the built-in intent of order menu item a built-in intent or bi for short is a pre-defined trigger for a specific kind of functionality that the user wants to do in this example it's order menu item which supports user journeys of ordering a specific menu item or cuisine type google builds and maintains language models for bis to understand every possible variation of a query that relates to that particular intent meaning you don't have to bis already support many different languages and we're always improving them because of this as google assistant improves its language support your app automatically benefits from these efforts the majority of biis also have fields which identify possible elements in a user's query which will pass your android application as parameters for this example pizza will be passed as a parameters value so the assistant has matched the bii of order menu item and has pulled an intense parameters from the user's request it knows about your supported capabilities because they are listed in your shortcuts shortcuts.xml along with how to fulfill them then it launches the app using the android intent that was declared in the capability this jumps users straight into the app's correct screen as well as any of the parameters the user provided with this example the capability used at bii let's dive a little deeper on what kinds are available app action supports tons of bis and there's a whole category of common bis the majority of android apps can use like open app feature which allows users to launch an apps feature or get thing which searches for a specific thing using the default in-app search feature in the application make sure to check this list out first when considering using biis we also have so many more biis that we've organized them into several categories here's just a few of them like order food communication and fitness check out the docs for the full list of biis for unique functionality that isn't supported with bis developers can use custom intents custom intents are developer created intent that functions similar to biis although you need to provide additional information we recommend using bis first and if you cannot find the functionality you want to use then use custom intents check out the docs for more information this is just the beginning of app actions there's tons of features and toolings that you can use to support voice controls once you have a capability defined you can also define shortcuts that invoke the capability you can think of shortcuts as an instance of a capability with some of its parameters having predefined values shortcuts are ideal for situations when users leave out information or assume your application already contains information for example if you're using the create taxi reservation bii a user might say something like hey google order me a ride home from example app home isn't an actual address but with shortcuts you can take that into account that users would say home and you can have your android app handle that correctly by passing home as a token so your app can resolve this for your most critical user journeys you can suggest to your users to create an assistant shortcut in your app which is a phrase that triggers a particular shortcut for example at the end of purchasing our pizza from the example before you can offer the user to create an assistant shortcut so next time they say hey google get my usual pizza the android app opens with the user's preferred pizza and is ready to be ordered in-app promotion allows a developer to initiate the creation of an assistant shortcut you could do this by constructing a special deeply that has the app's own deep link parameters inside it you can utilize widgets as a way to fulfill a user's query this option is great for situations that require a short or simple response for example a user who forgot what time a reservation is at and wants to easily get the time of the reservation finally regardless of what you want to implement you'll want to test out your app actions before publishing your app you can do that with google assistant's plugin for android studio this was a brief overview of app actions if you want to get started learning how to build check out our collabs for a step-by-step guide on how to build your first app actions and of course check out our docs for more details join our dev community on reddit where you can chat with other action on google developers and stay up to date by following us on twitter i'm jessica thanks for watching and i can't wait to see what you build