ISSUE 50 • ANDROID ADVISOR 35GOOGLE I/O 2018in the lower-left corner. Assistant will expand to fill
the screen, and you can begin typing. Assistant will
respond to all the same commands that you’d use
in a voice-dictation situation, and you’ll also find
contextual suggestions above the keyboard. And
because these suggestions are part of Assistant, they
appear no matter which keyboard app you’re using.
- Editable history
Google Assistant used to be a transient experience
– whatever you said to Assistant would be lost to the
ether as soon as you left the Assistant UI. But now
there’s a full history of your commands, and you
can edit them too.
To access your Assistant history, you need only
drag up on the overlay when Assistant pops up. This
will drop you into a full-screen interface that shows
your recent queries. Scroll up to see everything
you’ve asked and how Assistant answered.
Editing is a snap, too. Long-press on a query, and
it will be highlighted along with Assistant’s reply. From
there, you can either delete or edit it. Deleting will
completely remove the query (and associated activity)
from the history. This is just like removing something
from your Google search history, so it won’t be used
to inform future search and Assistant predictions.
If you choose to edit a query, the text is dropped
into the text field along with an open keyboard. You
can tap send to immediately repeat the command, or
make some changes and send it again. Just note that
none of this undoes the actions performed when the
command was first issued.