Google announced proactive Assistant recommendations in July 2018. A code commit that I spotted today suggests that this feature might be coming to Chrome OS as well.
Proactive Google Assistant notifications work similarly to the old Google Now. You launch the Assistant and without entering any command or asking questions, the Assistant will show you relevant information based on what it knows. This could be based on a calendar entry or a bill that’s due.
The code commit talks “Adds UMA histograms for Assistant proactive suggestions.” The remaining comments in the commit do not have out a lot of details. So I decided to review commits from the same engineer. Here is what I found in another commit:
Adds ProactiveSuggestionsClient in the browser.
The ProactiveSuggestionsClient observes the singleton BrowserList to
provide Assistant with the information needed for proactive content
suggestions.
Note that the ProactiveSuggestionsClient will only observe a browser if
and only if:
The feature is enabled.
The browser is not off the record.
Assistant is enabled.
Assistant screen context is enabled.
I found additional code commits from the same engineers, preparing Chrome OS UI for proactive Assistant recommendations. Here is an example:
Wire up proactive suggestions to Assistant UI. Pressing the proactive suggestions view will now open Assistant UI to show the proactive suggestions response inline. See bug for demo.
The bug referenced in these code commits, however, is private. It is quite sure that Chrome OS will soon get Assistant proactive notifications. What we need to know is how it will look and work on the UI.
My guess is that we will see this UI on Chromebook’s notification Area. There is a possibility for this to be integrated into Chrome OS launcher as well.
Where do you think this will show up in Chrome OS?
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