Google Assistant no longer available for commercial use?

Question

Is Google Assistant seriously no longer available for commercial use? Previously, you were able to but you had to get permission from them. Then at this page and even on their support page I run into this text:

Warning: You can't launch commercial devices that integrate with the Google Assistant SDK. It's available for experimental and non-commercial uses only.

So am I understanding correctly that Google is no longer allowing 3rd party hardware developers to add Google Assistant to their product? If this is indeed true, anyone know why?

Answer 1

Not quite. They're just saying that the Assistant SDK is no longer the route to go to embed the Assistant in your own commercial hardware. Given there are third party platforms that have the Assistant, I assume that they have a different platform that you need to partner with Google to use.

I can only speculate about why this is necessary, however my guesses are some combination of the following:

• The Assistant SDK does not provide a way to update itself on devices when necessary, which they would expect on a consumer device.
• The Assistant SDK doesn't support all the features that the Assistant now supports. In particular, it doesn't support streaming audio, which is the most popular feature for the Assistant.
• Likely at the core of both of these, many of the features of the Assistant are implemented on the client side, while the Assistant SDK implements nearly everything (except wake word) on the server side.