Google teams with Gupshup to develop voice-activated Actions for Google Home

Gupshup today announced that it has partnered with Google to help build the first voice-activated Actions for Google Assistant on Google Home. Bot builders can now use Gupshup’s tools to create voice-activated bots — called Actions. Among the initial Google Actions from Gupshup will be a bot for VentureBeat, which will be one of the first news organizations to make itself accessible on Google Home. The VentureBeat offering will be available later this month.

“The bot landscape has grown exponentially in the past year, enabling a world where intelligent conversational interfaces will soon be all around us: at work, at home, on every one of our devices and appliances,” said Beerud Sheth, CEO of Gupshup, in a prepared statement. “We are proud to be one of the first developer platforms to join Actions on Google and VentureBeat in taking this monumental step toward simplifying home automation.”

The partnership follows Google’s announcement that developers can now create custom Actions for Google Home using the Actions on Google platform.

In addition to development tools from Gupshup, bot builders can use API.ai (acquired by Google in September) to create Actions. “Because this is such a new burgeoning space with lots of innovation, we’ve been partnering with lots of other companies and ecosystems that are helping developers build conversational experiences. So that includes interaction and development tools like API.ai and Gupshup,” Google Assistant product lead Jason Douglas told VentureBeat. Bots created for Google Assistant will spread to Pixel smartphones and Allo in 2017, Douglas added.

Google Home users will be able to launch the Google Home bots by saying “Ok Google, let me talk to ______.” Gupshup’s partnership with Google furthers its entry into the marketplace of 6.4 billion connected devices, which support over $235 billion in total services spending, according to research firm Gartner. The firm forecasts that over 20.8 billion devices will be connected through the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020.

Last month, Gupshup launched its Flow and Template Bot Builders to help small business — like restaurants and hair salons — create bots without writing code. Gupshup had previously helped large companies like Barclays and Sage Software build bots, and it has partnered with Cisco Spark and Twilio to target enterprise customers. The company says its tools are used by over 30,000 developers to build services that process over 4 billion messages each month.

Gupshup’s partnership with Google meaningfully extends its efforts to be the top omni-channel bot developer for businesses and consumers across all messaging platforms — including voice and Google Home.

Additional reporting by Khari Johnson