Since the first reveal of Stadia, Google planned to incorporate Assistant into the game streaming service.
Some may remember that in the initial reveal, Google showcased an ambitious goal to have Assistant in Stadia offer up YouTube walkthroughs when players got stuck in a game. While that hasn’t come to pass yet, Stadia does support more basic Assistant functions.
Namely, Stadia users with an Android phone or Chromebook can use Google Assistant to launch games. For example, Stadia users can use the ‘Okay Google’ command with a smart speaker or display and say “Play Destiny 2 on the living room TV” to launch Destiny 2 with Stadia.
Similar commands will work on Android phones with the Stadia app. For example, the command “Play Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey” will launch the game in the Stadia app.
Finally, these commands will work on Chromebooks as well. For example, Pixelbooks have a dedicated Assistant key for launching the voice assistant. Users can type or speak a command to launch a game. Alternatively, Chromebook owners can use the dedicated ‘Search’ key to quickly lookup a Stadia title and launch it.
Some Redditors noticed that typing a game title and ‘game’ (i.e. Doom Eternal game) into Assistant will launch the Stadia title in a new tab. However, launching a game this way doesn’t take players to the usual Stadia URL, ‘stadia.google.com/player/xxxx.’ Instead, it goes to ‘ggp.sandbox.google.com/player/xxxx’ URL.
Regardless of the URL connected to the Stadia stream, it’s a much easier and faster way to launch a game. Typically, players would have to go to Stadia’s website, browse the game library and select a title to play.
While this is a fairly basic Assistant integration, it does reveal the convenience of building Assistant into nearly every service. I’d love to be able to quickly launch games from my Steam library by speaking/typing a search command into my Windows PC. The Assistant integration also serves as a reminder that Stadia games are just streamed media, which makes it easy to access them like you would a song or movie.
Source: Reddit, 9to5Google
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