是否可以阻止Google Assistant在Android TV应用中接管RCU麦克风按钮信号？

Question

The Android TV (ATV) app I'm working on has voice control capabilities. Basically, when the user presses the microphone button on a remote controller, the key event (identified by KeyEvent.KEYCODE_SEARCH ) is handled by the app, speech recognition starts (using android.speech.SpeechRecognizer ), the results (parsed speech) are obtained and parsed further by the app logic (eg showing the user search results or performing some in-app action).

Everything has been working as intended and described above, until, quite recently, Google Assistant (GA) was introduced to ATV platforms (the first one being Nvidia Shield box). Now, when the RCU mic button is pressed, the GA overlay appears and the mic key event doesn't even reach the app.

For the last few days I've done some extensive research (documentation, internet, forums, stackoverflow etc.) and experimented with some potential workarounds, but nothing's worked so far and I haven't been able to find any definite information on the topic (probably due to the ATV+GA combination being rather new on the scene, and the ATV ecosystem not being as large as the Android one).

The best hint I got so far is what's been done with the Spotify app for Android TV . When it's run on an ATV device with no GA, it basically behaves as I described above; but when GA is present, the GA overlay appears, receives the parsed speech and shows the search results, with results from Spotify in the first line - so, the Spotify app is integrated with GA, and this integration replaces the in-app voice control mechanism. This suggests that either there is no way to ignore/disable GA inside your app in order to receive the mic key event and proceed with voice control as usual, or at least this is the preferred way of handling voice commands now. It also shows that there are apps for ATV that approach voice control the way I described, so maybe someone here has already encountered similar problem.

My question(s):

• is it possible to prevent Google Assistant from taking over RCU mic button signal?
• is it ok to do so? (by "not ok" I would mean - are there any official guidelines that discourage such behavior - or at least are there valid reasons not to do so?)
• if so, can it be done?
• if not, is there a resource documenting how to integrate with GA (the way Spotify for ATV app does)?

Answer 1

Starting with your last question:

if not, is there a resource documenting how to integrate with GA (the way Spotify for ATV app does)?

I wrote about how to integrate on the Android Developer's Blog . Spotify has onboarded their content catalog to Google's services which is why the Google Assistant is able to work so well. You can achieve similar results if you make your app searchable (covered in the blog).

is it possible to prevent Google Assistant from taking over RCU mic button signal?

No, not at this time. The Google Assistant is a system app that takes control over the mic to give a uniform experience across all apps.

is it ok to do so? (by "not ok" I would mean - are there any official guidelines that discourage such behavior - or at least are there valid reasons not to do so?)

if so, can it be done?

You can still have an in-app search experience. There is an example in the leanback sample. You will need to set a listener on a BrowseFragment and implement a SearchFragment . We know this can be confusing, have in-app search and Google Assistant search competing, but we are working on how to improve this.