Google’s Assistant just got even smarter thanks to IFTTT

Between a chat app, two new smartphones and a new in-home avatar, Google’s new Assistant is really getting around. While that slow march toward ubiquity continues, it keeps getting smarter, too — Android Police points out you can now hook up Google Assistant to dozens of new IFTTT recipes, perfect for when you get tired of playing that emoji movies game. Just know this: you can only set up Assistant-enabled IFTTT recipes if you’re using a Pixel phone or the (as yet unreleased) Google Home.

It was only a matter of time, really. Google Assistant hasn’t quite reached its full potential yet, but it’s already great at interpreting spoken commands. With IFTTT — which basically acts as the connective tissue between lots of different web-facing services — Google’s Assistant just got a whole lot more useful. Just be sure not to confuse usefulness with novelty, since Amazon’s suite of Echo home assistants has played nice with IFTTT for over a year now.

Anyway. There are around 57 Assistant-friendly recipes available right now, ranging from mostly mundane (“OK Google, block some time” creates an hour-long event in Google Calendar) to the surprisingly specific (“OK Google, set oven to Sabbath mode”). We’ve tested a few already, and can confirm that Assistant’s voice recognition chops still work like a charm in these different contexts. Over the past hour, we’ve sent messages to Slack, added a handful of contacts to our Google accounts and added tasks to Todoist without a hitch. If only we had more smart home stuff around the office, we’d have told Google Assistant “it’s party time” — that puts Philips Hue lightbulbs in a color loop for maximum fun-times.

Via: AndroidPolice

Source: IFTTT

Alphabet’s experiments still lose money, but it’s getting better

Alphabet, semi-new parent company to the Google we all know and love / tolerate, continues to rake in money hand over fist. The company just released its financial statements for Q3 of 2016, and both revenue and overall profit continues to soar. All companies under the Alphabet umbrella pulled in $22.5 billion in the quarter (up 20 percent year-over-year), and net income rose 27 percent to $5.1 billion.

Unsurprisingly, nearly all of that revenue continues to come from Google: Alphabet’s more experimental “other bets” companies only brought in $197 million in revenue while losing $865 million of profit. As usual, Google’s ad business brought in the lion’s share of cash, and the company cited strength in mobile and video yet again as a source of growth.

However, there are a few bright spots for “other bets,” which as a reminder includes companies like Verily, the ailing Google Fiber, Google X, the company’s self-driving cars team, the Ventures investment group, Nest, Calico and a number of others. Revenue for those other bets increased 40 percent year-over-year, and the net loss dropped from $980 million a year ago to $865 million this quarter. That’s still far more than the revenue it brought in, but at least both of those figures are moving in the right direction. CFO Ruth Porat said that most of the revenue was generated by Fiber, Verily and Nest.

Google’s “other revenues” also increased to $2.4 billion — that’s notable because the category includes Google’s hardware products and Google Play. With the new Pixel handsets, Daydream VR and Google Home all hitting the market this month, that number could go up significantly. But it’s pretty notable that revenues from that category continued climbing last quarter, when a lot of Google’s hardware was getting old. Of course, Google Play never goes out of style. Indeed, Porat did note on today’s call that the growth was primarily driven by Google Play and Cloud services like Drive and Google Apps.

Alphabet is holding an earnings call in just a few minutes — we’ll update this post with anything notable that comes from it.

Source: Alphabet