Google Assistant voice control of playback to be disabled

For some time now, Astiga has supported voice control for Google Assistant. This allows you to use a Google Assistant device, for example a smartphone, and directly play music from the Assistant app via Astiga.

You do this by saying something like "Ok Google, talk to Astiga" and then "Play Never Gonna Give You Up". Google Assistant plays the music directly, without opening the Astiga app. You don't even need the Astiga app to be installed.

What's changing?

Google are changing the way voice enabling works. Basically, they are removing support for direct playback within Google Assistant, in favour of controlling Android apps (i.e. the Astiga app) instead.

This means Astiga will stop working directly inside Google Assistant on June 13, 2023. You'll still be able to launch the Astiga app from Google Assistant, but you won't be able to directly issue voice commands within Assistant to play music from Astiga.

What's next?

So thoughts turn to alternatives. The most obvious path is to build more voice control into the app.

However, in deciding what to do, I need to decide how to allocate development resources for this. I just ran some basic log file analysis to see how much the Google Assistant voice control is actually used.

In the past two weeks, it was invoked sixteen times. That's globally, across all users.

This makes me thing it's not high priority to get migrated. But have I missed something in my analysis? I'm pretty sure simple searching the access logs for this is enough, but in case someone out there is using Google Assistant a lot and it's not showing up, I want to know this.

Note that this does not count Assistant commands of the likes of "Ok Google, open Astiga". Such commands do not hit our servers.

It'd be interesting to know if anyone is using this more than I think, or maybe would use it more, if it worked better!