Google is opening the gates to something that should ultimately make the Google Assistant a lot more useful: it’ll now allow other companies to create custom commands when the Assistant is built into their products. So the manufacturer of a smart dishwasher that supports Google’s voice assistant could add a command to “start a hypercycle,” even though that’s not a universal feature found on other dishwashers.

Right now, devices with Assistant built in are limited to a number of universal commands that Google has set up on its own, like “on,” “off,” and “dim.” Additional functionality can be added via Actions (apps, basically), but that requires an extra step for owners every time they want to use it. That’s obviously pretty limiting if…

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