Assistant can now share personal info in lo, but only if you let it

BY GreenBot Staff

Published 15 Feb 2017

One of the coolest features of lo is the ability to bring Assistant into any conversation. st type @google you can ask Assistant questions like “at’s my schedule like today” or “Show me the latest Cars 3 trailer,” it will happily oblige, saving you the trouble of opening Chrome or Calendar searching yourself.

Now is making it easier to share that personal information with other people. First spotted by Android lice, the new feature gives you an option to send otherwise private data to your friends in an instant, but only if you allow it.

For example, when you’re in a chat you ask Assistant something like, “at are my upcoming flights,” or “Show me my upcoming appointments,” it will now ask you if you’d like to share that information with the other people in your group. Tap Don’t Share it will send a message saying, “Can’t share this right now.” Tap Share Now, however, it will display the information it has retrieved on your phone for all to see.

Unfortunately, you can’t choose a contact to share it with when in a one-on-one conversation with Assistant, nor can you keep your personal queries completely hidden, but the ability to share information like this could prove to be useful in certain situations. The server-side feature isn’t tied to a specific ay Store update, though Android lice surmises that you likely need version 6.0 of lo, which began rolling out last week.

Talk to me: ile limited to just calendar entries, travel information, contacts, the new sharing option has pretty big potential. Assistant has been frustratingly limited inside lo—where it ought to excel in a natural conversational format— this new feature could signal a new collaborative direction for lo. However, without proper SMS integration, lo is likely to remain a niche app, no matter how smart Assistant gets.