Fashion gets a digital upgrade with the Google Awareness API

Posted by Jeremy Brook, Group Creative Business Partner, the ZOO

Last summer,
we made the Awareness API
available to all developers through Google Play services for the first time,
providing a powerful and unified sensing platform that enables apps to be aware
of all aspects of a user's environment. By using a combination of context
signals, such as location, physical activity, weather and nearby beacons,
developers can better understand their users individually and provide more
engaging and customized mobile app experiences.

We have already seen some great implementations of the API in obvious scenarios,
such as shopping for a new home in the neighborhood or recommending a music
playlist while starting a jog. For New York Fashion Week, we explored other
creative integrations of the Awareness API and collaborated with H&M Group's
digital fashion house Ivyrevel and
its Fashion Tech Lab to bring couture into the digital age with the 'Data
Dress,' a personalized dress designed entirely based on a user's context signals.

Currently under development, the Android app specifically uses the Snapshot
API within the platform to passively monitor each user's daily activity and
lifestyle with their permission. Where do you regularly eat out for dinner or
hang out with friends? Are they more casual or formal meetups? What's the usual
weather when you're outside? After the course of a week, the user's context
signals are passed through an algorithm that creates a digitally tailored dress
design for the user to purchase.

The Android app is launching in closed alpha stage, and is currently being
tested by selected global style influencers including Ivyrevel's co-founder Kenza Zouiten. If
you want a truly 'tailored' digital experience, sign up here to participate in a future trial of the
app before the public release.

Get the guide to finding success in new markets on Google Play

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Developer Marketing at Google Play

With just a few clicks, you can publish an app to Google Play and access a
global audience of more than 1 billion 30 days active users. Finding success in
global markets means considering how each market differs, planning for high
quality localization, and tailoring your activity to the local audience. The new
Going
Global Playbook provides best practices and tips, with advice from
developers who've successfully gone global.




This guide includes advice to help you plan your approach to going global,
prepare your app for new markets, take your app to market, and also include data
and insights for key countries and other useful resources.




This ebook joins others that we've recently published including The
Building for Billions Playbook and The
News Publisher Playbook. All of our ebooks are promoted in the Playbook for Developers app, which is
where you can stay up to date with all the news and best practices you need to
find success on Google Play.

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Start building Actions on Google

Posted by Jason Douglas, PM Director for Actions on Google

The Google Assistant href="https://blog.google/products/assistant/personal-google-just-you/">brings
together all of the technology and smarts we've been building for years,
from the Knowledge Graph to Natural Language Processing. To be a truly
successful Assistant, it should be able to connect users across the apps and
services in their lives. This makes enabling an ecosystem where developers can
bring diverse and unique services to users through the Google Assistant really
important.

In October, we href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4y0KOeXViI&feature=youtu.be&t=1h16m8s">previewed
Actions on Google, the developer platform for the Google Assistant. href="https://developers.google.com/actions/?utm_campaign=product area_launch_actionsgoogle_120816&utm_source=gdev&utm_medium=blog">Actions on Google further
enhances the Assistant user experience by enabling you to bring your services to
the Assistant. Starting today, you can build Conversation Actions for Google
Home and request to
become an early access partner for upcoming platform features.

Conversation Actions for Google Home

Conversation Actions let you engage your users to deliver information, services,
and assistance. And the best part? It really is a conversation -- users won't
need to enable a skill or install an app, they can just ask to talk to your
action. For now, we've provided two developer samples of what's possible, just
say "Ok Google, talk to Number Genie " or try "Ok Google, talk to Eliza' for the
classic 1960s AI exercise.

You can get started today by visiting the href="https://developers.google.com/actions?utm_campaign=product area_launch_actionsgoogle_120816&utm_source=gdev&utm_medium=blog">Actions on Google website for
developers. To help create a smooth, straightforward development experience, we
worked with a number of
development partners, including conversational interaction development tools
API.AI and Gupshup, analytics tools DashBot and VoiceLabs and consulting
companies such as Assist, Notify.IO, Witlingo and Spoken Layer. We also created
a collection of href="https://developers.google.com/actions/samples/?utm_campaign=product area_launch_actionsgoogle_120816&utm_source=gdev&utm_medium=blog">samples and voice user
interface (VUI) href="https://developers.google.com/actions/design/">resources or you can
check out the integrations from our href="http://support.google.com/assistant/?p=3p_developers">early access
partners as they roll out over the coming weeks.

Introduction to Conversation Actions by href="https://google.com/+WaynePiekarski">Wayne Piekarski

Coming soon: Actions for Pixel and Allo + Support for Purchases and
Bookings

Today is just the start, and we're excited to see what you build for the Google
Assistant. We'll continue to add more platform capabilities over time, including
the ability to make your integrations available across the various Assistant
surfaces like Pixel phones and Google Allo. We'll also enable support for
purchases and bookings as well as deeper Assistant integrations across
verticals. Developers who are interested in creating actions using these
upcoming features should href="https://assistant.google.com/developer/eap/">register for our early access
partner program and help shape the future of the platform.

Build, explore and let us know what you think about Actions on Google! And to say in the loop, be sure to sign up for our newsletter, join our Google+ community, and use the �actions-on-google� tag on StackOverflow.