Jio Reliance‘s JioPhone is the first feature phone to receive support for the Google Assistant, the Indian division of the Alphabet-owned company announced Tuesday. The new version of the firm’s artificial intelligence companion is officially launching in India today and supports both English and Hindi, marking the first expansion of the Google Assistant to devices that aren’t generally considered “smart.” While the newly introduced service is a heavily streamlined revision of the actual Google Assistant, its core functionality is still here, with the platform being meant to provide users with a highly intuitive method for searching the World Wide Web. Voice-enabled queries and support for countless data services are just one of many reasons Google believes its new offering will prove to be useful to Indian consumers, with the company suggesting that many functionalities found in the initial feature phone port of the Google Assistant were designed for first-time Internet users.
Among other things, JioPhone owners can have the Google Assistant help them send text messages, make phone calls, search the Internet, play multimedia files, and launch any apps they might have installed on their device. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant didn’t provide many details on how the new iteration of the Google Assistant came to be and it remains to be seen what its practical limits are. The wording of the company’s announcement indicates that Internet of Things compatibility isn’t part of the package, i.e. the newly introduced service likely can’t be used for controlling one’s smart home devices.
The KaiOS powering the JioPhone has a proven track record with voice-enabled assistants as it already features support for Jio’s own HelloJio. The operating system itself is essentially a fork of Firefox OS that’s not only used by Jio but has also been featured on Alcatel’s OneTouch Go Flip and the Intex-made Turbo+ 4G. It’s currently unclear whether other KaiOS-powered offerings will eventually receive Google Assistant support and if Google is looking into more feature phone candidates that could host its digital companion. The new revision of the Google Assistant was announced at Google India’s latest New Delhi event which also saw the introduction of Android Oreo (Go Edition) for low-end mobile devices.
Google wasn’t the only company to make Android related announcements today. We have previously learned that Google has partnered with 25 different companies to launch their new Made with Google certification program and they’re working with some software companies as well. Today, we also learned that Google has teamed up with the developers of Spotify to bring Google Assistant integration to your connected devices. With the Google Assistant SDK and the Actions on Google platforms, 3rd-party companies are able to integrate hands-free voice commands into their products and services. With the Google Assistant SDK, this has helped to create all sorts of new products that were not available before. With the Actions on Google SDK though, this lets developers leverage Google Assistant from Google Assistant enabled devices (including connected speakers, earbuds, smartphones and more). When Google Home was launched, they included support for Spotify that let those customers listen to music from the popular streaming service. However, this was limited to Google Home and left many wondering why the feature didn’t work on other devices that had the Google Assistant. Spotify has just announced that both free and premium Spotify users will be able to use their voice to control Spotify across Google Assistant-supported devices. The feature isn’t available just yet, but the company says the new update will begin rolling out “in the coming weeks.” To give you an idea as to what will be supported when the update reaches your device, they have included a number of voice commands that will work with it. You can initiate it with a simple “OK Google, play Spotify” command, or get more specific with “OK Google, play Discover Weekly.” You can even use it like other music stream services and say “OK Google, play Today’s Top Hits on my Chromecast” to get your music playing on a specific device on the network.
Since Google Assistant’s introduction as a mobile assistant back in October 2016, it has also come with its fair share of bugs and issues that have been ironed out with subsequent updates, together with new features like keyboard input support, screen scan improvements, and a lot more. A recent issue has been plaguing some Google Assistant users, in which whenever “What’s on my screen” is pressed, the Google Assistant page would scroll all the way up to the top of your Assistant’s history, with the user having to manually scroll down to see their intended search results.
Obviously, this is a pretty annoying behavior which breaks the UX of the screen scan mode of the Google Assistant. This issue has been going on for quite some time without a fix from Google to be seen, requiring an annoyed user to manually report the issue over at the Google Issue Tracker on September 25th. The issue was originally reported to happen on a Google Pixel running Android 8.0 Oreo, with the 7.10.35.21.arm64 version of the Google app. It was picked up by a Google employee around an hour after it was initially reported on the Google Issue Tracker, and it was marked as fixed by the same Google employee on September 27th.
It was also confirmed that the fix was rolling out in a future release of the Google app, which given the nature of the bug, should be pretty soon. The video depicted above shows the issue in action on the original user’s Google Pixel device on Android Oreo. There’s currently no details on when will said future release will actually roll out to users, but if you’re affected by that issue, then be on the lookout for a future Google app update, where a fix will be readily available. You can read more on said issue, along with the answers provided by Google, in the official Google Issue Tracker thread.
