Introducing the Google Assistant SDK

Posted by Chris Ramsdale, Product Manager

When we first announced the Google Assistant, we talked about helping users get things done no matter what device they're using. We started with Google Allo, Google Home and Pixel phones, and expanded the Assistant ecosystem to include Android Wear and Android phones running Marshmallow and Nougat over the last few months. We also announced that Android Auto and Android TV will get support soon.

Today, we're taking another step towards building out that ecosystem by introducing the developer preview of the Google Assistant SDK. With this SDK you can now start building your own hardware prototypes that include the Google Assistant, like a self-built robot or a voice-enabled smart mirror. This allows you to interact with the Google Assistant from any platform.

The Google Assistant SDK includes a gRPC API, a Python open source client that handles authentication and access to the API, samples and documentation. The SDK allows you to capture a spoken query, for example "what's on my calendar", pass that up to the Google Assistant service and receive an audio response. And while it's ideal for prototyping on Raspberry Pi devices, it also adds support for many other platforms.

To get started, visit the Google Assistant SDK website for developers, download the SDK, and start building. In addition, Wayne Piekarski from our Developer Relations team has a video introducing the Google Assistant SDK, below.

And for some more inspiration, try our samples or check out an example implementation by Deeplocal, an innovation studio out of Pittsburgh that took the Google Assistant SDK for a spin and built a fun mocktails mixer. You can even build one for yourself: go here to learn more and read their documentationon Github. Or check out the video below on how they built their demo from scratch.

This is a developer preview and we have a number of features in development including hotword support, companion app integration and more. If you're interested in building a commercial product with the Google Assistant, we encourage you to reach out and contact us. We've created a new developer community on Google+ at g.co/assistantsdkdev for developers to keep up to date and discuss ideas. There is also a stackoverflow tag [google-assistant-sdk] for questions, and a mailing list to keep up to date on SDK news. We look forward to seeing what you create with the Google Assistant SDK!