https://www.instagram.com/p/CNvF032JuTo/

Last year, at the Caribbean Developers virtual gathering, I demonstrated a bot that displays air quality information based on sensors at a few spots in Trinidad & Tobago. My remarks on it can be seen here.

This week, I went ahead and pulled together the work to publish that bot as an Action on Google.

The bot will surface the same information available at the environment management authority has on their site.

I tried to show it to a friend and found it a bit difficult to invoke. You have to say, “OK, Google, Talk to air IQ agent” just so, for it to work, and then, it just says “Hi there! What area are you interested in?”.

If you look at your phone or other assistant screen, it’ll show the options.

But it won’t actually say anything else. You have to just know the area choices. Should I have caught this in testing? Yes, but I may have been working on getting it all to work and less focused on how it actually works.

So, that’ll be fixed. Nevertheless, I’m glad to explore yet another channel for virtual assistants and in cases like this, I feel it’s much easier to talk to your assistant that remember which site should be checked to find out factoids like this.