One of the most popular features of Google Assistant becomes more and more useful

On Wednesday, Google announced a series of Google Assistant updates, including a broadcast enhancement, one of the most popular features of the artificial intelligence assistant. New updates come before the holiday shopping season, when Google Assistant-enabled devices, such as the Google Home Hub, will be compatible with Amazon Alexa-enabled devices.

The broadcast feature allows you to send a message from your phone to smart speakers and smart screens in your home. Now, the recipients of these messages can answer from a smart screen or a smart speaker and send a message back to your phone. The answer will trigger a notification on your phone and the message will be transcribed.

Google also leverages devices that combine visual content with Google Assistant to provide customers with recommended recipes. "Smart screens, such as the Google Home Hub, Lenovo Smart Display or JBL Link View, are perfect companions in the kitchen to browse recipes and get cooking instructions step by step," Google said in its blog.

Google also adds other children's stories and family-friendly content that Google Assistant can share. This also gives Google Assistant more user-friendly answers for families with prompts such as "Hey, Google, I've lost a tooth." Family friendly answers are available when children under 13 are connected to devices such as Google Home via the Family Link app.

In addition, users can set up alarms from popular animated characters with Google Assistant on smart speakers. For example, a user might say, "Hey Google, set up a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle alarm for 8:00 pm".

Voice-activated assistants are becoming more and more ubiquitous, in part because of the rapid growth of the smart speaker market. According to Strategy Analytics, global smart phone shipments in the second quarter reached 11.7 million units, compared with only 3.9 million in the second quarter of 2017. The Google Home Mini system was the most popular in the world. second quarter, but Amazon remains the main player in the market. Amazon recently introduced the Alexa presentation language, which allows developers to create voice experiences with graphics, images, slideshows, and videos.

The updates announced Wednesday include a couple focused on Android phones. Google adds routines to the Clock app for Android phones. This means that a user can trigger his morning routine (which may include recording weather information and turning on the coffee maker) after triggering the morning alarm. Users can customize their routine with the Clock application.

The Google Assistant will also be able to switch Android devices to Do Not Disturb with a single command.