The new Google Assistant has been promised to not just open apps but to actually directly integrate and interact with some of the apps on your phone. We’ve seen the digital assistant slightly interact before in apps like Photos, Messages, WhatsApp, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, etc. One of the apps that you probably use often is Chrome and now we’re seeing how it can work more broadly with the browsers. Well, that is if you have a Pixel 4 as it’s the only device that can do it for now.
The update hasn’t exactly rolled out yet to Pixel 4 owners. But according to Android Police, you can try to enable it even if it seems to be a server-side switch. There are several “requirements” though if you want to try it out. First, your Google Assistant has to be in a supported English variant. You also have to enable full gesture navigation and you must not have any G Suite accounts signed in on your device.
If you meet the above criteria, open your Chrome and then go to chrome://flags/#direct-actions and if the flag is already set to default, this means it’s a server-side switch. To see if the new Google Assistant integration will work for you, just force enable it and then restart your browser. Since it’s not yet a full roll-out or even an official update, there are chances that it might not work but hopefully, you’ll be able to see how it will work with your Google Assistant.
There are nine commands that you can give your Google Assistant when it comes to Chrome:
* Open a new tab
* Close this tab
* Close all tabs
* Go back
* Go forward
* Reload
* Bookmark this page
* Open history
* Open downloads
They say Help and Preferences should also work but they don’t seem to be triggering anything inside Chrome. This is just a preview for developers on the capabilities of Google Assistant within an app if they would eventually like to integrate it with their own apps. Let’s wait for a future official update for Chrome in case you don’t want to do this manually.
