Actions on Google UK SDK and All US Assistant Apps Available Today
Google announced this morning in its developer blog that the Actions on Google UK SDK is now available. This release offers British English support. The update also includes four new voices, two male and two female, that app developers can choose for their voice apps. The post mentions that Akinator, Blinkist Minute and SongPop have already optimized their Google voice apps for British users.
Female 1 en-GB (preview)
Female 2 en-GB (preview)
Male 1 en-GB (preview)
Male 2 en-GB (preview)
All Google Assistant Apps Now Available in the UK
The other announcement is that all of the Google Assistant apps available to US english users are also available to UK users as of this morning.
Starting today, we’re making all your apps built for the Google Assistant available to our en-GB users across Google Home,…select Android phones and the iPhone.
This is a different approach than Amazon has taken. Alexa skills originally designed for the U.S. are not made available to UK users until they are updated for British English and re-certified for that geography. Google’s more liberal approach means that UK users now have access to 468 Assistant apps. The blog post does recommend that Google Assistant app developers review their response text strings to ensure they will perform well and align with differences in British English such as accommodate those “pesky little Zeds.” Cheers!
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