This new Google Assistant can finally control Chromecast directly from the comfort of your phone
Google Assistant
Presenting the Google’s very own Google Assistant is a voice-controlled smart assistant. It’s considered the upgrade or an extension of the Google Now which is basically designed to be personal – while expanding on Google’s existing “OK Google” voice commands.
For those who has been using an Android smartphone for quite some time now, you’ll know that the Google Now feature smartly gathers out relevant information for you. Basically, it knows where you are, your work, and it knows your meeting locations and travel plans as well, even the sports teams you like, and everything that interests you, and this data is presented to you though cards and through reminders on your Android device.
By simply saying the “OK Google” or “Hey, Google” side covers voice commands, voice searching, and voice-activated device control, lets you do things such as send messages, check appointments and more on your Android device, just like the iPhone’s Siri or on iPad. The Google Assistant fuses everything with a new bot-centric AI experience, primarily designed to give you conversational interactions which cover both these areas and many more.
The devices that offer Google Assistant
In earlier 2016, the Google Assistant was launched on the Google Pixel smartphones and Google Home. It’s basically available on Android Wear devices through Android Wear 2.0, Android TV via Nvidia Shield and soon to be Sony TVs as well, and Android Auto. Originally, Google said Assistant would be exclusively available for the Pixel phones, but this soon changed, with the company confirming it would come to Marshmallow and Nougat updated OS devices.
From then on, we’ve seen Assistant make its way to Android devices such as the LG G6, Samsung Galaxy S8, and OnePlus 5. Unfortunately, the full experience is deeply integrated into the Pixel devices at first, so you’ll get an awful lot more out of it than you can on other Android devices.
Other phones and devices that supports Google Assistant
As Google started rolling out the update in February 2017 for the Android 7.0 Nougat and 6.0 Marshmallow phones, several new phones have been announced or launched with running Google Assistant feature since then; those include:
- Samsung Galaxy S8 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- Samsung Galaxy S8+ -Amazon UK – Amazon US
- LG G6 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- HTC U11 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- OnePlus 5 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
The update brought Google Assistant to several compatible phones first in the US first, and then the UK, Australia, Canada and Germany followed.
The not-so-new Android phones that will also get or should now have Google Assistant compatible with include:
- Samsung Galaxy S7 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- Samsung Galaxy S7 edge – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- OnePlus 3T – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- HTC 10 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- HTC U Ultra – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- LG G5 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- LG V20 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- Sony Xperia XZ – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- Sony Xperia XZ Premium – Amazon UK – Amazon US
- Huawei P9 – Amazon UK – Amazon US
Google hasn’t released yet the officially confirmed the full device list for the Google Assistant upgrade, however, it comes as part of a Google Play Services update for devices that runs on Android Nougat and Android Marshmallow, which means that many phones should be supported as well. Google Assistant basically supports several languages such as English, German, French, Japanese, and Portuguese, and will roll out support for more languages in the future.
