Google Assistant is getting smart as hell

At its #madebygoogle event today, the company's engineering lead for Google Assistant, Scott Huffman, explained how the AI-powered system would get several new features and capabilities in the days to come – and it all sounds pretty exciting. For starters, Huffman noted that, beyond featuring in Allo and Home, Assistant will be an open platform that developers can build functionality for, and also integrate the service into their own products. It'll allow people to do things like find information about local businesses, search YouTube for videos and surface content through deep links into installed apps. To that end, Assistant will support two kinds of actions: Direct actions, which allow it to accommodate simple requests like'turn off the lights', and Conversation actions, which require a bit of back-and-forth between the user and the system (such as booking an Uber to go to a specific destination). The possibilities for developers to build actions for their own services into Assistant are seemingly endless: Huffman said that the platform will allow for complex activities like ordering groceries and playing games through text, voice and hybrid interactions.