[Eridrus]

I don't recall where I saw it, but I recall reading a comment from Google saying they weren't planning on having "Apps for Home" where the voice commands were things you installed like on Android/Echo, but were keeping it locked down and working with partners for the foreseeable future.

Alexa is actually not a walled garden at all; skills are almost entirely separated from each other, and I think that will be one of the biggest problems though. My gut says that the reason language is convenient is that it allows for things to be implicit rather than explicit and I expect the voice assistants that will be most useful are the ones that can best understand this context, which will require deeper integration.

[KirinDave]

> I don't recall where I saw it, but I recall reading a comment from Google saying they weren't planning on having "Apps for Home" where the voice commands were things you installed like on Android/Echo, but were keeping it locked down and working with partners for the foreseeable future.

Except that: https://developers.google.com/actions/

OFC partner negotiations will need to take place in this; this is a new field with massive implications for customer security and caution and oversight _should_ be the watchword. Imagine the open ecosystem model for this and the disasters it could bring.

But the door to the ecosystem is plainly marked now and the rules are posted over the queue. You can do it today.

[Eridrus]

Ok, I went and found what I'd read: http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13878444/google-home-devel...

> The first and most important difference is that Google is not going to create an “Action Store” where users can select which ones they want and “install” them on Google Home. Instead, Google itself is going to approve all the keywords that developers want to use to invoke their actions and make them all available to everybody.

> That effectively means that actions will be curated by Google (like an app store), but users won’t have to install anything before using them (like the web). “It's not a direct analog to any existing ecosystem,” says Jason Douglas, director for actions on Google.

That article does specify that there will be a hand-off to 3rd party systems, rather than Google orchestrating everything, but it still sounds quite tightly constrained and I think that if the plan is to have things all work nicely together and not be silos, then tighter integration with more Google control will be the name of the game.

[g00gler]

Even explicit instructions don't work for some reason.

With Google voice assistant I can't say "look up the New York Giants score then text it to Phil"

I don't recall reading that functionality in the Alexa docs, either.

Seems natural and logical to me.

* I had to specify New York Giants because Google always brings up the SF Giants if I don't