Android Question Launching app from google assistant

Wimfish

New Member
Hi Guys,


i'm a newbie here, it's my first adventure in to app development, because i'm currently doing a fun project where i want to enable voicecontrol on my labelprinter.
I even subscribed to a competition with my project for which i got a free SBC to realize it, so that's kind of cool!
In short the SBC runs a webserver that sends the text it receives, from whichever source, to the labelprinter using a POST request.
I wanted to create an app that uses VoiceRecognition to push a string to the webserver.

I've been researching a bit, and there are a few options.

Option 1 - the full option way :
plan: use deeplinks and google actions to incorporate the app completely into Google assistant:
status : fail and abandon
reason : it requires a lot of nitty gritty details that don't seem to be supported yet with B4A, and also a BIG reason : you can't omit going through the play store for this option.
Google does some integration of the actions.xml file when you upload it to the play store.

Option 2 - pragmatic, but harder to use :
plan: embed voice recognition into the app and handle the simple dialog in the app itself.
status: app works completely, sending the http POST works and labels are coming out, some finetuning to do such as error handling, refining dialog,... but the basics are there.
Also a big thanks to the person who helped me to get this far, if you're out there, you know i'm talking about you! ;-)

Problem : whenever i upload my app to my phone with B4A-bridge it doesnt want to open this app from the google assistant. (using "hey google, open <appname>")
It's really annoying because I would love this to be an "all hands free" application, what's the use if you still have to open your phone.
I could run the Google Assistant on the SBC itself, but that would require extra hardware and would take the whole concept of it being an IOT device away...

I've gone throug lenths to try and get it to open the app, but can't get it to work.
What have i done so far?
  • using 2 different phones :
    one is my PocoPhone F1 running MIUI 11, works perfectly, didn't work, tried setting system and assistant settings to english (i speak Dutch), but nope
    the other is my old MOTO X Pure phone, on which I firstly used the original Androir 7.0 installed, didn't work
    After this i bootloader unlocked and installed Lineage OS 15.1 (that's android 8.1) fully in English right from the getgo, made sure no other bloatstuff is there, but nothing.

  • Used APK instead of installing through the B4A-Bridge
    i thought maybe it was an indexing problem of the apps by the assistant or something, but also by installing the apk it didn't work.

  • Using different names for the app
    I thought maybe my naming of the app was ambiguous, so i tried a couple of differnt ones

  • turning the phone off and again
    because : Hello, IT?

anybody had a similar experience before?
should I change things in my manifest maybe?

Looking forward to your input,

Wim - the newbie
 
Last edited:

Wimfish

New Member
Thank you Erel, no i haven't seen that code just yet!

But i've read enough in the forum to know about your legendary status!
Thanks for helping so many people in this forum!

I'm going to try and implement this example and check if it works on my systems!
I'll come back with feedback right here.
 
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Wimfish

New Member
I had some time to check this example now, however interesting it's not what i'm looking for.

Ideally I'm looking for either an implementation of THIS
It implements deeplinks into the app and publicishes those links in the manifest.
I also read somewhere that this only works if the app passes through the play store, but not sure of it.

well, I couldn't find that implementation in B4A, so i thought i would work around by just starting the app from the assistant by saying "open <app-name>"
and handle the rest of the voice interactons inside the app.
It's important that this is a 100% hands free for the proof of concept to make sense....

thanks for the help.
 
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