New Voice Assistant Issue

2249581 said:

instead of launching Google Assistant directly, triggering Voice Assistant on the Venu will run a Tasker task that launches Google Assistant.

It launches assistant on the phone but it still has the sound / microphone on the watch? Or is assistant on the phone independent of the watch?

Yes, the microphone and sound still work on the watch - exactly the way Voice Assistant is supposed to function.

That's fantastic! Can you share how you did it? I have used Tasker in the past.

Sure. Here's how I set everything up.

First I went to App Settings on my phone, selected Google, then Open by Default, and clicked Clear Default Preferences.

I then launched Voice Assistant on my watch, and my phone prompted me to select an app. I selected "Tasker Secondary". I think I may have had to do some additional Tasker setup at that point.

I created a new profile with "Secondary App Opened" as the trigger, and created a new task to run in this profile.

Inside the task, I added a new action of type "Tasker Function", and had it call the "LaunchAssistant()" function.

That's the important stuff. If you leave it like this, Voice Assistant will work, but it may not be much better than the default implementation. I went a step further and added some error-handling.

First, I created 2 new profiles. The first one sets a variable called %btConnected when the watch connects and clears it when it disconnects. I used the "BT Connected" state for this, with the MAC address of the watch as the parameter.

The second profile sets a variable called %assistantRunning when Google Assistant is running and clears it when it stops. For this I used the "App" condition and selected "Assistant Settings" (you have to click "All" on the app selection screen to see it). I used enter and exit tasks to set/clear the variables in both profiles.

With the variables set up, I added some additional code to my Secondary App Opened task. Before I call LaunchAssistant(), I check to see if %btConnected is set. If not, I attempt to connect to the watch. After I call LaunchAssistant(), I wait a half-second, then check %assistantRunning. If it's not set, I call LaunchAssistant() again, then wait another half-second, then check %assistantRunning again. I have the task set up so that it will retry up to twice before it gives up.

There are still occasions where the watch just plain won't connect, and every now and then the voice response from Google Assistant won't play through the watch speaker, but the bottom line is that I can now pull up Voice Assistant and and be reasonably confident that it will actually work.

I have a Pixel 7 Pro, and I can't guarantee that this will work on your phone, but I hope it helps.

I should mention that the Assistant Settings app trigger isn't foolproof, and the condition doesn't always fire when Assistant launches, but it's the best method I've come up with so far.

Thanks so much for taking time to post this! I have a Pixel Fold so hopefully it will work!

Also FWIW the assistant will now work on my phone if I uninstall all the Google app updates. But then every night the app updates itself and I have to do it again the next day,

2249581 said:

That's the important stuff. If you leave it like this, Voice Assistant will work, but it may not be much better than the default implementation. I went a step further and added some error-handling.

Well my Tasker skills are apparently not great LOL but I was finally able to set up the profile and it is working so far! I had previously been using a workaround of uninstalling the latest Google updates every day (play store keeps reinstalling them). But my Pixel got "circle to search"  and uninstalling the updates removed that feature. So I had to choose between circle to search or voice assistant on the watch. Now I have both . Your error handling code is probably above my skill level. Maybe I will try it after some Tasker education. Anyway thanks so much for coming up with this, 2249581!

Hi, thanks for this. Would you consider exporting your project and adding it to Tasker net?

Agree, I tried to follow but quickly got lost. 

Would be awesome if you can share the tasker project

I added the profiles. When I trigger it opens the assistant. But making them dependent I get lost. 

Thank you!