SAN FRANCISCO, April 20 ― The American company is introducing new features for its assistant. New capabilities will make it possible to order food even faster, to customize one's connected home and to finally get help finding one's iPhone.
Responding to the trend for ordering food via the internet, Google has developed a tool to make ordering even faster. Now you just have to search for your desired eatery and then select “order online.” Once you've made your choice, the assistant takes care of completing the order with your details. Of course, you must have previously configured your payment information in Google Pay. A final payment confirmation and you're almost sitting down to eat. For the moment, the service is only available in the United States and with partner restaurants, but Google hopes to implement this new mode of operation in the course of the year for other countries. According to The Verge, the Google assistant will only be able to help you with pick-up orders; deliveries are not yet supported by the system.
Built around Duplex, a kind of artificial intelligence that can perform tasks such as booking restaurants or checking opening hours, an AI service can then make a call to obtain information on opening times of the restaurant and then automatically changes it in the database of the search engine. The goal for Google is to make online forms easier and faster to fill out.
Google Assistant wants to make itself indispensable
Other new features that will appeal to tech enthusiasts are the ability to find your iPhone and create your own personalised and automated routines in your smart home. Already available on Android, it was impossible for the assistant to find an iPhone or an iPad if the device was silent or did not have an internet connection. This is no longer the case. As long as you choose to receive “notifications and critical alerts” from the Google home app, the assistant can now help you find your smartphone.
Google Assistant is making the most of the connected home and continues to make advances in the area. It will be possible to configure actions that can be triggered automatically at sunrise or sunset. To do this, the assistant takes into account the position of the sun so that the action is carried out at a specific time of the day rather than at a fixed hour. For example, you can plan to close the shutters 15 minutes after sunset or to turn on the watering automatically at dusk. Available in the Routine tab of the Google home application, easy to set up, this feature can be used worldwide. ― ETX Studio
