One of the reasons Amazon's Alexa assistant has become so popular is because it can be integrated into nearly everything. We've seen phones, speakers, and even refrigerators with Alexa. Now Google is opening up Google Assistant to the same level of accessibility, with the new Google Assistant SDK.

With the SDK, developers can integrate Assistant into existing products fairly easily. It remains to be seen how much functionality will be available to third-party devices running Assistant, as it is already fragmented on Google's own devices. But the focus seems to be primarily on voice, not visual displays like Assistant on Android.

To make developing easier, the SDK includes the gRPC API, a Python client that handles user authentication and access to the API. This is especially useful if you are trying out the SDK on a Raspberry Pi or similar development board.

This first version of the SDK is a Developer Preview, with several features still in development - including hotword support and companion app integration. Google has created a G+ community, a Stack Overflow tag, and a mailing list to help out developers using the SDK. I'm definitely going to try it out myself.

Source: Google Developers Blog