Open Gapps now lets you install Google Assistant

For a while, Google Now has been Google's answer to Apple's Siri but even though it is more useful and accurate than Siri in some cases, it always lacked Siri's quirky personality. Google Assistant was hence introduced at Google I/O last year as a voice assistant with some personality traits but later when it launched, it was exclusive for Google made hardware such as the Google Pixel, Google Home, and Android TV. We also got a glimpse of Google Assistant with Allo which could be installed on any android or iOS smartphone, but the assistant works only with texts. Other than that, Google Assistant is available on the NVIDIA SHIELD TV (2017) and is rumoured to be a part of the upcoming LG G6 as well.

Of course, it didn’t take long for developers to find out ways to bring the Google Assistant to almost all Android devices running Android 6.0 and above. Popular Google Apps package provider ‘Open GApps‘  has now made enabling Assistant a little easier by adding an option to enable Google Assistant during installation of Open GApps.

This can be very helpful to users of custom ROMs (like me) who lament having to modify the build.prop after every new ROM. Sure modifying build.prop is like the easiest way to modify other than just flashing things but it would be even easier now that it can be done while still in recovery.

All builds of GApps from Open GApps starting February 3rd will have the option to enable Google Assistant. Users will be prompted to enable the build.prop modification while in the AROMA installation environment. You will need to add the ‘GoogleAssistant’ keyword to the gapps-config file in case you prefer the non GUI builds which are comparatively smaller in size.

This option will remain as an opt-only since Google Assistant has yet to learn a lot and it still is quite behind Google Now in terms of being useful.

Source: GitHub

Kailash Sadhikar

An engineering undergrad student who loves all things tech. He has a soft spot for Android.