The Mountain View giant, Google, has today announced that the Google Assistant is now even more tightly integrated with WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world.
Users will now be able to make voice calls and video calls through WhatsApp by just asking the Assistant to do it. You can say something like “Hey Google, WhatsApp video John” to make a WhatsApp video call. This is a great addition, because so far, the Google Assistant defaulted to using Duo for video calls, and the Phone app for voice calls on Android devices. With this new integration, people are more likely to actually use the Assistant to make video calls for them.
Up until now, the WhatsApp integration in the Google Assistant was barebones to say the least; users could ask the Assistant to send a WhatsApp text message to their contacts, but that was about it. With this new change, Google has given users one more reason to use the Assistant more often in everyday scenarios.
While Google has already announced the feature, it looks like it’s either not rolling out yet, or just hasn’t rolled out widely enough. A quick test on our phones here at the Beebom office revealed that the Google Assistant and WhatsApp integration was not working on our devices with the Assistant simply responding with “I can’t make WhatsApp calls yet”. That’s slightly disappointing, and Google hasn’t really given a timeline on when to expect these features to arrive, but hopefully it’ll be sooner rather than later.
