While this is not a relatively new idea, Google recently announced that its flagship digital assistant, Google Assistant, is now capable of booking ridesharing services such as Uber or Lyft. Google said that it is rolling out this new feature in order to catch up with the digital assistant market.
It is important to note that this particular feature has long been implemented by other digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. What took Google so long to implement it into its platform is still a mystery to many tech analysts.
With this new feature, Google Assistant users can now book Uber or Lyft rides by simply giving the command like "Hey Google, book me an Uber." Google said that this new feature will be activated on Thursday. The tech giant added that aside from Android phones, the same feature will be rolled out to Google Home speakers and other platforms supported by Google Assistant.
There are two ways on how to book ridesharing services through Google Assistant. The first way is to specifically request what ridesharing provider the user want to use. Another way is to order a ride and have it pick the user in a specific location after that Google Assistant will give the user a list of different available services along with their respective pricing and wait time next to it. The user can then choose which service they want to tap.
Among the confirmed ridesharing services supported by Google Assistant upon the rollout of this new feature are Uber, Lyft, Ola, Grab, and GO-JEK. Google has yet to confirm the complete list of services that support its new feature.
As far as the competition is concerned, Amazon's own digital assistant Alexa can book both Lyft and Uber services since 2016. Apple's flagship digital assistant Siri can only tap Uber services through the iPhone, but not Lyft.
Google said that this new Google Assistant service will only support the English language during its rollout. Nevertheless, the tech giant said that the feature will eventually be made available to support other languages within the coming months.
Google has recently confirmed that the company is also rolling out an update that will redesign Google Assistant's user interface. Many tech experts said that this design update was rolled out in order to seamlessly sync the new feature into Google Assistant's visual elements like showing the list of prices and the map on the screen.
