Google Assistant Retreats on Conversational Actions with Firstenberg, Tucker, and Schwartz - Voicebot Podcast Ep 258

Google announced it will be sunsetting support for third-party conversational actions–the voice apps that work with Google Assistant–in June 2023. It decided there was no point in maintaining a separate app store just for voice and it is encouraging conversational action developers to port their experiences over to Android apps. This special edition of the Voicebot Podcast showcases Allen Firstenberg and Mark Tucker, both active developers of conversational actions and other voice app experiences. Firstenberg is a GDE for Google Assistant and Mark Tucker is an Alexa Champion so both have some notable accomplishments in the space. They are both also well known in the voice developer community in part from their Two Voice Devs podcast and YouTube show. We discuss the impact on the Google Assistant and Alexa ecosystems and how this will shape the future of voice assistants.