If you’ve ever used the Google Assistant to help you make bookings in restaurants and hair salons without having to actually talk to a real person, then you know how useful (or useless, depending on your experience) it is. During the I/O conference, they mentioned that they will be expanding their concierge automation engine which includes buying movie tickets online. We haven’t heard anything since then until now as it looks like they’re finally testing out this upcoming feature.
In an article on Android Police, they expounded on how it will actually work once it rolls out and what’s happening now while they’re testing it. When you look up showtimes for the movie that you want to see, you’ll have to select your booking site. And if it’s one of those that are supported by Google Assistant, you’ll see an Assistant prompt to “Buy tickets”. Tap on the button and it will bring you to the website but will have a persistent Assistant tab.
It will be able to guide you through the process from just the Assistant tab but when it comes to selecting your seats, you’ll have to do it on the service’s website itself. But payment is through Assistant with most of the form fields filled in, depending on the personal information that you’ve shared with Google already. On paper, the process seems to be pretty straightforward and convenient so hopefully that is what it will look like in real life.
Currently, the chains and sites owned by AMC and Fandango can be used by the Duplex-powered Google Assistant. Since it’s a “live” service, the prompts for each of the sites may vary, depending on the process of the website. Some users trying it out however experienced that the Google Assistant in Chrome was hanging. Google said that they want to use this testing phase to get feedback from users and “improve the feature”.
We’ll let you know if we hear about when you will be able to buy your movie tickets with the help of the Google Assistant. In the meantime, you’ll still be able to do all the restaurant and hair appointment bookings that you want with supported restaurants and salons.
