I'm developing a new action that sends the word "resume" (as in pause/play/resume) to be spoken. When this happens Google Home will pronounce the word as "résumé".
I know SSML supports the tag to handle pronunciations but it doesn't look like that is implemented currently with Google Home.
Worst-case I could hack the text to be "re zoom", but I'd rather find a more elegant solution. Ideas?
This isn't an ideal solution, but you can use the <sub> tag for SSML to simulate the correct pronunciation. Try something like:
<sub alias="re zoom">resume</sub>
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I have created an action called Sequematic. The name is a combination of the words sequence and automatic.
Unfortunately when asking Google to 'talk to Sequematic' it has a hard time recognising the name.
Is there anything I can do to help with recognition of the name?
At this moment there is very little that you can do to help Google Assistant with action recognition. The recognition is done by the voice recognition within the Google Assistant device itself and this is managed and trained by Google.
The only trick that I know is by playing around with the name pronunciation in you actions on google settings. This only works if the recognition is changing the name to a close match, something like "Sekuematik" because the recognition does not know how to handle the word. You could pick "Sekuamatik" as your action name and change the pronunciation to "Sequamatic".
While this works, it still changes your actions name, so your action name will be displayed as "Sekuematik" on any visual element in Google Assistant. So this trick might work for some people, but it is far from ideal.
The only other options you would have is wait for Google to update their voice recognition or maybe contact Google Assistant support and request their help to see if they can do something for your action name.
I know you can make custom Google Assistant triggers that will invoke IFTTT. But I want to make a custom trigger that will do something but /also/ keep the default Google Assistant behavior. Is there a way to do this?
Description of my actual goal: I speak German as much as possible at home with my daughter. But there are times where I don't know a word, so I can say "OK Google, what is $word in German?" and it will speak it to me. This is very useful.
Then I manually add that word to my vocabulary list to study it.
I would like to write my own Python/Node microservice that will receive the word and generate flashcards (do a lookup on Linguee for sample sentences, for example) in my study program automatically.
But I would also like to keep the Google Assistant behavior that reads the translation back to me on my phone.
So is there a way to accomplish this? Basically instead of having a trigger invoke Google Assistant, I'd like it to do that and also do a second behavior (issue a POST request to a custom URL).
Thank you.
I would like to make my Google Assistant (Google Home & Android Smartphone) a little bit smarter by adding simple small-talk intents and (last but not least) usefull "Ok Google, do whatever" or "Ok Google, tell me when ..." intents.
For now I only own an Echo Dot with Alexa and I really hate their conception of skills due to their strict invocations. I have read somewhere that Google is going to come around this nightmare by using implicit invocation. However what I have done so far is not even close to good.
With implicit invocation, Google Assistant can find the correct action by searching for intents. This is good and I can add a simple phrase that Google detects correctly. However, instead of invoking that intent, Google asks me if it should ask appname to do so.
Of course this is not really an option if we want to make digital assistants smarter, since this not only destroys any kind of smartness, but also prevents us (at least me) from writing usefull actions at all (because it would be annoying to develop and to use it). They should be able to react to specific phrases and intents instead of requiring to specify the App. This makes it impossible to create simple intents like "Say goodnight" or "Ask my girlfiend when she will be here".
My question is not only if this is currently possible, but also what we can expect regarding this problem in the future? Is there any good news? Or do we have to wait, until we can help the existing assistents to evolve their real power?
You can add custom trigger phrases that will open or deeplink into your skill.
With query pattern in action.json.
Action.Json Query Pattern (Google Doc)
But the amount is limited. And I am not sure if you can completely avoid that google ask some stupid stuff like should i really open it... or i am opening now...
And maybe you have also to say ok, google to make it start listening at all.
Nick Felker's answer is better than mine. To expand on it a bit:
In the Google Home app on your phone tap the hamburger menu icon (three horizontal parallel lines) in the upper left, then go to "More settings", then "Shortcuts" (near the bottom), then press the little blue "+" button in the lower right to set up your custom shortcut.
Another option for extremely simple intents "Say goodnight" for example, is to use IFTTT, which has lots of integrations out of the box as well as the ability to pass along the message to a webhook which you could write yourself. Important caveat: IFTTT isn't "smart" itself, so that first layer of integration only does simple string matching (and I mean simple; it seems to be case-sensitive).
If I use the <say-as interpret-as="characters"></say-as> tag in my voice response, google assistant suddenly pronounces the whole response differently. It sounds as if google assistant removes punctuation without any reason. The pauses, which are initiated by the ".", are suddenly gone.
To reproduce this behaviour, just launch the actions on google simulator, choose "English (United States)" as langauge and listen to this audio snippet:
<speak>This is a test with number spelled as digit. The number is <say-as interpret-as="characters">12345</say-as>. Ask me "What to do with this number?" if you'd like to have more information.</speak>
If you remove the <say-as interpret-as="characters"></say-as> tag, the pronounciation works again:
<speak>This is a test with number spelled as digit. The number is 12345. Ask me "What to do with this number?" if you'd like to have more information.</speak>
This now sounds like it should sound. You will get the same result if you leave out the speak tag at all.
In German, this issue is even more critical. Using <say-as interpret-as="characters"></say-as> in a German voice response leads to a response which honestly is barely understandable.
This is because of "text normalization" in Google Assistant's TTS process.
Because of that, SSML without using the <s> element won't always do what you expect for pauses if you are using embedded markup like <say-as>.
Here's an example using <s> to provide intended pauses in the TTS:
<speak>
This is a test with number spelled as digit.
<s>The number is <say-as interpret-as="characters">12345</say-as>.</s>
Ask me "What to do with this number?" if you'd like to have more information.
</speak>
You can still feel free to input multiple sentences separated by periods into SSML without needing <s> to separate sentences and let Google Assistant handle the break generation as long as you are not using embedded markup like <say-as>.
More information about the <s> element can be found in the docs where it talks about <p>,<s>
https://developers.google.com/actions/reference/ssml
It will link to the W3C spec on those elements.
Is it possible to create a hyperlink in an sms in an iPhone?
For example, if I want the word 'foo' hyperlinked in HTML then I'll write foo in a normal situation.
If I want to have a certain word in my sms to be hyperlinked to something, is there any way I can do this? Like "I have a surprise for you" and the receiver taps on the hyperlinked word 'surprise' which will take the user to the destined page.
Any suggestions as to how this can be done? Examples and samples welcome!
Thanks in advance :)
No, you cannot use html tags in sms / text messages. All you can do is insert the URL without the tag. It then depends on the receivers device whether the URL is presented to the user as link or as plain text.
I experimented with exactly this just yesterday. It seems you can't include a nicely formatted hyperlink, unfortunately. I hope to be proven wrong by somebody else, though :-)
However, as you've probably seen yourself, iPhone is able to recognize an URL and you can tap on it to open the URL in Safari (or tap the disclosure button next the message to get more options on what to do with the URL). As far as I can tell the only thing you can do is format your SMS accordingly: "I have a surprise for you: http://foo.com" even though that might spoil the surprise ;-)
No, you can't do this due to privacy issues. Apple thinks that giving you this ability would allow you to link users to malware and such. Sorry!
i don't think it's possible to create hyperlinks in SMS.
The only way is to send an URL, and the iPhone will convert it to a link...
Use a tiny url from tinyurl.
It doesn't allow you to do exactly what you are wanting but it at least can be used to cover up the long link.
This is the closest thing I figure out to do. I was wanting to use the "
No, you can not do this. However you could use tinyurl and format it like this
http://whateverYouWantToSay#tinyurl.com
Web browsers usually ignore anything before an # therefore you could effectively hide the actual site being linked to, as long as your friend does not know that.
What actually happens is the data before the # is submitted to the web site in the form username:password. However it must be a site that requires authentication to access, or the site will normally just ignore it.
If this helps, I've noticed that a custom hyperlink is possible on the OS X Messages app, but they have to be copied and pasted. To replicate this right click on a hyperlink in your browser and hit copy link. Then paste into Messages.
Uhhh this is possible here is a screenshot of an example - I copied a link from email and pasted in a new SMS - though it appears you cannot type html to create a link....