How to set up and customize Google Assistant on the Pixel

How do you customize your experience with the Google Assistant on the Pixel?

While Google Assistant made its official debut with Allo, it wasn’t until the release of the Pixel that we’ve seen more of what Google has in store for their personal AI assistant.

There’s so many ways to use the Assistant throughout the day, from getting a daily briefing first thing in the morning to conveniently setting an alarm for the next day and nearly everything in between. To get the most out of Google Assistant, you’ll want to know about all the settings and features, and we’re here to help.

• How to set up Google Assistant on your Pixel
• How to change your account with Google Assistant
• How to customize your “My Day” briefing
• How to customize Google Assistant’s news sources
• How to customize your Google Assistant nickname
• How to unblock offensive words
• How to view your activity history

How to set up Google Assistant on your Pixel

Google Assistant is baked right into the Pixel or Pixel XL, and can be accessed by long pressing the Home button or by saying “OK Google” if you’ve got voice activation enabled. If you’re logged into your Google Account, but have yet to set up Google Assistant, you can start the process by launching it from the home screen for the first time.

Launch Google Assistant by long pressing the Home Button.
Tap Continue on the “Meet your personal Google Assistant” screen.
Tap Yes, I’m in on the next screen to allow permissions.

And that’s that. You might also be prompted to configure voice activation, which just involves you repeating “OK Google” three times. Pretty simple!

How to change your account with Google Assistant

If you have more than one Google account active on your phone, it’s important to make sure Google Assistant is connected with the one you want. Google Assistant is able to pull details from Gmail, Google Photos, and other Google services including your calendar events as well as your Chrome browsing habits, so you’ll want to make sure you’re using your primary account.

If you accidentally set things up with the wrong account or simply want to switch over to a different account, it’s really easy.

Launch Google Assistant by long pressing the Home Button.
Tap the menu icon in the top-right corner of the Google Assistant window.
Tap Accounts.
Tap the account you want to use.

Switching between accounts is easy to do, though you’ll need to go through the quick setup process and allow the required access permissions.

How to customize your “My Day” briefing

You can use Google Assistant to give you a briefing on everything you need to know to start your day, from weather forecasts, calendar reminders, and a preview of your work commute. If you don’t need all that, you can customize it to suit your needs.

Launch Google Assistant by long pressing the Home Button.
Tap the menu icon in the top-right corner of the Google Assistant window.

Tap Settings.

Tap My Day.
Tap the checkboxes to toggle what’s included in your My Day summary.
You can also toggle whether to end your summary with narrated news reports.

How to customize Google Assistant’s news sources

Google Assistant can help you keep up to date on what’s going on in the world with its narrated news service. It pulls radio news reports from reliable news sources which you can listen to after your daily briefing or by saying “OK Google, listen to news”. If this seems like a valuable feature to you, you’ll definitely want to customize your news sources.

Launch Google Assistant by long pressing the Home Button.
Tap the menu icon in the top-right corner of the Google Assistant window.

Tap Settings.

Tap News.
Tap Customize.

Swipe up to scroll through the list of news sources.

Tap the news sources you wish to add.
Tap the back arrow.
Tap and drag the news sources in the order you want to listen to them.

How to customize your Google Assistant nickname

Google Assistant will call you by your first name by default, but you can teach it to call you any nickname you want.

Launch Google Assistant by long pressing the Home Button.
Tap the menu icon in the top-right corner of the Google Assistant window.

Tap Settings.

Swipe up to scroll down to the bottom.
Tap Personal info.

Tap Nickname.

Tap the edit icon next to your name.
Type in whatever you want you nickname to be.
Tap OK.

If you don’t like how the Google Assistant is pronouncing your nickname, you can opt to spell it out phonetically by tapping the “Spell it out” radio button under Pronunciation.

How to unblock offensive words

By default, Google Assistant will censor all offensive words. If you’re alright with salty language, you can turn it off quick and easy.

Launch Google Assistant by long pressing the Home Button.
Tap the menu icon in the top-right corner of the Google Assistant window.

Tap Settings.

Swipe up to scroll down.
Tap Voice.
Tap the toggle switch next to “Block offensive words”.

Google Assistant will never swear, but now words deemed as offensive won’t be censored in the transcriptions of what you say.

How to view your activity history

Your Google Assistant will keep track of not only all your search activity, but also where you were when you made your request. Google assures this data is kept secure and private. If you’d like to review your activity history and see the details, you can access it straight from the Google Assistant settings.

Launch Google Assistant by long pressing the Home Button.
Tap the menu icon in the top-right corner of the Google Assistant window.

Tap Settings.

Swipe up to scroll down to the bottom.
Tap My Activity.

Chrome will launch and you’ll be taken to Google’s log of all your logged activity with Google Assistant. From there, you can tap “details” to see more information, including roughly where you were when the activity occurred. If this sort of creeps you out, you can tap “Activity Controls” to toggle some of the settings, but this is basically what you signed up for to use Google Assistant.

Google Pixel + Pixel XL

• Google Pixel and Pixel XL review
• Google Pixel XL review: A U.S. perspective
• Google Pixel FAQ: Should you upgrade?
• Pixel + Pixel XL specs
• Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
• Join the discussion in the forums!

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How to play the Halloween Google Doodle

Today is Halloween and to celebrate, Google has created a mini game as its commemorative Doodle. The game sees you playing as a cat on a quest to get back a book of spells from an evil ghoul. We’ve played the full game so we can help you know how to play it.

The game requires you to draw shapes with your mouse to fight off incoming ghouls and ghosts. The shapes are a vertical line, horizontal line, up arrow, down arrow and occasionally an S and a heart if you’re running low on lives. If there is more than one ghoul with the same shape above its head, then drawing this shape will kill them both off, or remove one step of a combination.

The shape that you need to draw to kill each ghoul appears above its head. In the first level you just need to draw one shape per ghoul but as the game progresses you’ll need to draw sequences and combinations for each one.

Each of the five levels has a boss at the end of it, and these take three attempts each to kill them off. In between drawing combinations to kill off each boss, there’s a wave of regular ghouls to try and take your lives away. You get five lives in the game, but if you do lose one, you can either get them back from killing more ghouls, or a small ghoul will appear to the side of the screen with a heart shape above its head, draw a heart and you’ll be rewarded with a life.

You can’t draw a life for a heart at any time, you can only do it when the ghoul appears.

Each time you kill a ghoul and boss you get points, our high score was 84,780 and that included losing a few lives during the game. Presumably it would’ve been higher if we were quicker on the draw. We were using a Mac trackpad for the game too, so it might be easier to use a physical mouse.

Nevertheless, it’s a good little Halloween game from Google and once you’ve got the hang of it, you can play it as many times as you want to try and beat your high score.

Best geek Halloween pumpkins from around the ‘net

Halloween is upon us and you can fully expect to see a host of ghoulies, ghosties and altogether spooky shenanigans going on throughout the day. But let us not forget that scariest of darkened room dwellers, the ghastly geek. They often emerge from their grisly abodes at this time of year, moaning and a-groaning – mainly about JJ Abrams’ overuse of lens flare effects on the Star Trek/Star Wars franchises.

They also light up the internet with their fine examples of tech-tastically carved pumpkins. And we have curated a mighty fine collection of their wares for you so that you can get in the mood for a spot of trick or treating tonight.

Alex Wer

Games feature heavily, as do Apple and Star Wars (Abrams or not), but there are plenty of surprise carvings too. So sit back, pour yourself a glass of bat’s blood (or Vimto as we like to call it) and enjoy this vast array of amazingly reshaped vegetables, including the superb USS Enterprise versus the Millennium Falcon by habitual pumpkin fiddler Alex Wer and the painted Angry Birds pumpkins we came across a couple of years back.

You can check them all out in our gallery above, just flick through for some classics.

Nintendo’s president confirms the Switch won’t kill off the 3DS

Nintendo recently unveiled the Switch games console with a teaser trailer. In it, it showed the console could be used as a portable handheld machine, which you can use to play multiplayer games with friends using the detachable Joycon controller.

• Nintendo Switch: Release date, specs and everything you need to know

For many, it signalled the end of the 3DS, as it could be seen as a competing console. However Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima has confirmed that the 3DS will stay, claiming the “business still has momentum” in an interview with Bloomberg. Kirishima went on to say “we think the 3DS can continue in its own form” and said that the Switch “isn’t a successor to the Wii U or 3DS”.

The teaser trailer for the new console only gave away a few details, such as the ability play at home or on-the-go, as well as in multiplayer mode. Kirishima told Bloomberg that the trailer serves only to show “a conceptual image of how the Switch is different from the Wii U and previous systems”

“Going forward of course, in terms of what kind of accessories will come out, we want to show this in January and later. By no means was that everything”.

Kirishima is referring to Nintendo’s 13 January event, where more details about the Switch console, including games currently in development will be revealed. It’s also hoped that Nintendo will give some indication as to how much the Switch will cost when it goes on sale in March.

Best Car 2016: EE Pocket-lint Gadget Awards nominees

The Pocket-lint Gadget Awards 2016 will be taking place for the 13th year at the end of November in association with EE. There are 14 categories this year, with a couple of new ones joining in the form of Best VR Device and Best Car, as well as a split of the wearable category into Best Smartwatch and Best Fitness Tracker.

Each of the 14 categories has between five and seven nominations, all of which have been reviewed by us in full at some point in the last 12 months. As usual, we have been detailing the nominations for each category through a series of features over the last couple of weeks, all of which can be found in our Awards hub. This is the last of those features, focusing on the nominations for Best Car 2016, what we love about them and why they have been shortlisted.

This is a brand new category for the Pocket-lint Gadget Awards, as we mentioned, and with seven nominees, it’s a very exciting one. Only one can be crowned king of the road, but which will get your vote? Do you think Ford’s Mustang deserves the crown? Or perhaps Audi’s Q2 is the car of the year in your eyes?

Click here to see the Awards nominees for 2016’s Best Car in a little more detail to help you make your mind up about which one should get your vote.

Voting in the 13th annual EE Pocket-lint Awards is now open so you can let us know which one of these great devices you think should win the Best Car award for this year and give us your verdict on all the other tech across the 13 select categories.

Winners will be announced at the exclusive event in London on 23 November in association with EE. For now, keep an eye on the EE Pocket-lint Gadget Awards 2016 hub for all the latest on how the voting works, who the elite judges are and the EE Pocket-lint Gadget Awards shortlist.

Tesla Solar Roof will power your home and look good in the process

Popping a solar panel on your roof is a great way to generate free, sustainable energy for your home but there’s one major drawback, it is often unsightly. Some councils even frown upon them.

However, Tesla’s latest concept would be approved of by anyone and everyone. Its Solar Roof covers the entire top of a house, yet you wouldn’t notice.

That’s because each roof tile is a smaller solar panel. It looks like slate but is made of strengthened glass with a solar cell contained inside.

There are even different styles of glass tile, with Tuscan, slate, textured and smooth variants, and you’d have trouble distinguishing the former three with a normal, everyday roofing tile.

• What is SolarCity and why is Tesla buying it?
• Tesla: Everything you need to know about Model 3, Model S, Model X, and more

They were announced during a special Tesla event by company head Elon Musk. He didn’t mention price though, so we doubt the Solar Roof will be cheap to fit.

However, Musk did point out that it won’t be much more expensive than having an entire conventional roof refitted. And think of the saving you’ll make on electricity bills in future.

The next solar powered initiative Tesla is speculated to unveil will be a next generation electric car. There’s currently no word on when that will be.

Sony to unveil new Xperia phones at MWC 2017?

Sony already has a great magnitude of smartphones in its repertoire but that seemingly hasn’t stopped the company from wanted to release even more. TechRadar has picked up evidence from the European Economics Commission of two new smartphones, with codenames G3112 and G3121. The codenames are for Xperia phones, but they don’t give away what series they’ll be when they’re launched.

• Sony Xperia XZ review: Falling short of flagship

It’s likely they’ll be Xperia X smartphones, but probably an X2 series, rather than add to the current X lineup. The current lineup comprises the Xperia X, Xperia XA, Xperia X Compact, Xperia XZ and Xperia XA Ultra. Adding two more to that would be a little too much.

The two new phones are expected to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next February, considering it would make the current lineup a year old and previous Xperia releases in 2015 and 2016 have had codenames beginning with E and F.

No other specs, details or features have been leaked or speculated so far, but now we know the phones exist, expect rumours to start popping up.

Battlezone review: Arcade fun for PlayStation VR

So PlayStation VR has arrived, offering a cheaper-than-PC means of experiencing the joys of virtual reality on PlayStation 4. But like every new item of gaming hardware, it’s in dire need of a so-called killer app: a game which is an abdolute must-play.

Battlezone doesn’t quite fit that bill, but it’s a cleverly designed effort which, crucially, feels fully realised – whereas many first-wave VR games resemble extended demos – and should definitely be on your shopping list if you do succumb to PlayStation VR’s charms.

Battlezone review: A classic reimagined

The nature of virtual reality demands slightly different reviewing criteria to non-VR games: for example, developers haven’t yet worked out how to add narrative to VR games in a satisfying manner (stories presented in conventional voiceover seem restrictive in an immersive world). So if you were to compare Battlezone to a normal game, you would say that its campaign is light on ebb and flow. But it easily makes up for that by taking advantage of many of VR’s unique possibilities.

On paper, you could also argue that it’s an odd candidate for what is being presented as the cutting edge of modern gaming, since it’s a labour of retro-love. That’s because it’s a reinvention of the 1980 Atari arcade tank-warfare classic – for which canny Oxford developer Rebellion obtained the intellectual property rights in 2013.

But with its (then-innovative) first-person viewpoint and vector graphics, along with the viewing goggles built into the earliest version of its arcade cabinet, in hindsight, the original Battlezone eerily prefigured virtual reality. And Rebellion’s 2016 reinvention more or less proves that point. When you first get it going, before jumping into any action, it instantly provides that sense of presence which is the raison d’etre of good VR. You find yourself in a voluminous and very convincing tank cockpit which is both high-tech and appropriately retro – virtual screens with green text, for example, reference the arcade original’s green-on-black colour-scheme.

Battlezone review: Battling basics

A brief tutorial introduces the basics – Battlezone uses a standard PS4 gamepad as its controller, and shows you a virtual version of that controller in-game if you look down, in order to avoid disorientating disconnections. The controls are pretty intuitive – switching between weapons proves to be a key mechanic, since the more powerful weapons take an age to reload, as they would in any tank.

The tutorial demonstrates that the tanks – actually hover-tanks, given the futuristic setting – are surprisingly fast and manoeuvrable. The landscape through which you battle will also induce waves of 1980s nostalgia, as they look like they could have been ripped straight out of Tron, with plasticky textures galore, copious neon and primary colours to the fore. This style keeps things looking smooth, avoiding any nausea.

When you jump into the game proper, there are a couple of decisions to make, since each session is procedurally generated. First, you must choose whether to play offline or online – the two games are structurally the same except online you can play co-operatively with up to three others, and difficulty levels are cranked up accordingly.

Next, you must choose your tank – light, medium and heavy ones have different weapon load-outs and trade armour off against manoeuvrability. Then you decide on the length of the campaign you want to play (to conform with good VR practice, each campaign is delivered in bite-sized chunks), and that campaign is generated.

The campaign is visually represented as if it were a board game, resembling an arena formed from hexagonal tiles, and the idea is to get from one side of it to the other. It’s a good idea to plot a course towards the control towers dotted around the board – taking control of those can swing the battle your way, as the enemy faction grows in strength with every battle, and sends Nemesis boss-tanks to seek you out.

Battlezone review: Arcade difficulty

In the spirit of the arcade original, Battlezone is pretty hard and unforgiving. You start with three lives and once your lives have been used up, that’s the end of the campaign.

You can buy lives using data, which enemy tanks, towers and bases drop when you destroy them, but they are pretty expensive, and the same currency is used to upgrade your tank, which can be performed to a fine degree (for example by reinforcing rear or front armour).

Before venturing onto a new hexagon, you can drop a probe to see what is in store, but it’s much more fun to approach a battle blind. Occasionally, you may encounter no resistance, and some hexagons merely bring supplies, allowing you to purchase new weapons or change your loadout. But usually, you are assigned a task, which might be protecting a convoy from enemy attack, taking down an enemy base (while making sure yours remains intact) or taking out an enemy convoy.

While the game’s AI isn’t enormously fierce – enemy tanks take a while to lock onto you, although you have to take care not to expose yourself to missile-firing towers – the difficulty derives from how plentiful the enemies are, and you have to pay attention to the amount of damage you’re taking. Battlezone is sufficiently hard that, for once in a game, it’s worth selecting Easy mode while you’re learning the ropes.

Picking the right tank is mostly a matter of deciding which of its weapons you prefer – Rebellion has put some thought into the standard loadouts. For example, a medium tank comes with a gun that can lock onto multiple targets, as long as you have them in line of sight, which is very handy, but locking on takes a while, as does reloading, so you will come across occasions in which it’s necessary to switch  to the tank’s conventional rocket, which must be aimed carefully. Thus, as you find yourself in different situations, you evolve weapons-based strategies.

Verdict

Battlezone is pretty simple – both in terms of structure and gameplay – but, just like the arcade original and its contemporary games, you soon discover that there is depth to its gameplay, and the element of procedural generation provides plenty of reasons for you to return to it.

By ordinary game standards, it would feel a bit one-paced, but judged by the criteria which must be put in place for VR games, it’s a winner – it’s great fun, and transports you most convincingly to a different, Tron-like world.

On its own, it might not persuade you to take the plunge and lash out on a PlayStation VR. But if you have bought a PS VR, make sure you grab a copy.