Google is giving developers a new way to let Android users interact with their apps with voice commands. The company announced the launch of its first set of partners for custom voice actions, as well as plans to expand it more broadly.
Google said in a Google+ post, “This feature will enable people to say things like ‘Ok Google, listen to NPR’ or ‘Ok Google, show attractions near me on TripAdvisor.’ We’re currently piloting custom voice actions with a select group of partners, but we plan to open it up more widely in the future — and we’d love to hear your ideas for actions you’d like to implement.”
“Google Voice Actions let users quickly complete tasks in your app using voice commands,” Google explains. “It’s another way to drive usage of your app with Google. Users’ voice and text action requests can now lead directly to your Android app, so they can get to your native mobile experiences quickly and easily.”
“Google Voice Actions provides support for defining custom actions to support use cases not addressed by system actions,” it says. “For example, developers have implemented commands like ‘scan my receipt on Walmart’ or ‘watch trailer for Inception on Flixter’. The custom voice actions feature let you define these kinds of new commands.”
Google has a form developers can fill out here if they wish to request voice actions for their apps. They can request up to three for now.
Voice actions recognize many spoken and typed action requests, and create Android intents for them. Google explains how to define an intent filter, handle the intent in your app, and report what your app did using the App Indexing API here. You can also add voice search to your app by following the instructions here.
Image via Google