What I learnt about Google Assistant Actions and why I love them

Following this post you will be able to develop a small Action for Google Assistant.

What are Actions?

Actions are a cool mean to extend Google Assistant, no need to write code!

If you know how to fill a spreadsheet, that's all you are required to do. :)

How can actions be useful?

Since Actions can be developed starting from a template, you can immediately obtain trivia, quiz or flash cards.

Since I'm studying Chinese in the free time, I really love flashcards.

Ok, let's do it!

To start building your own action, just browse to the page:

https://console.actions.google.com/

and click on "Add/import project". I called mine "Chinese Flashcards" but you can rename it as you prefer.

Then you can choose which kind of project you want to develop. This time let's choose "Flash Cards", since it's just ok for our test.

Now it's time to choose a "personality": it's just the preset of voices and musics we can add to the app to enrich it.

In the "Content" step it's only possible to create a spreadsheet by clicking on the button "Bulk upload the content for your app using Google Sheets": clicking on "Make a copy of the pre-filled Google Sheet for editing". When you're done, you have a spreadsheet in your Google Drive prefilled with two tabs. In the first tab there are four columns:

• Question: the question itself (required)
• Answer: the correct answer to this question (required)
• Hint: an hint to help the user. (optional)
• Followup: a quick explanation of the correct answer (optional)

In the second tab you can find the "Configuration" of your app: here you can define the number of question for every game, the title of the game and so on...

This is mine!

Back to the "Content" dialog, click "Next", just paste the sheet URL in the provided box and click on "Upload" and "Create App". After a while your app is ready!

To test the app, click on "Test App" button: ready to play?

Going back to the "Overview" panel let you publish your app: before you have to complete some information about it and submit it as a draft.

Why do I love this?
I think Google Assistant Apps are an easy and fun way to involve audience in activities otherwise seen as boring like learning.
In particular, students can use the voice recognition to improve their pronounce when talking in a foreign language they would like to learn.
Absolutely complete as a learning support!

References

https://developers.google.com/actions/templates/