#30-Days of Actions on Google Challenge — Highlight

Though it has been nearly 2 years that i have been developing Voice applications in Alexa and in Google Assistant. It feels like that i am somewhere at the end of the road when i look at some of the great voice applications.

Thought about learning the concepts again from scratch but it gets skipped due to other tasks and things started to decline from another side whatever the actions which i have published in Google Assistant has been taken down.

When things are going in their own way. On Feb 21st, 2020 a message from slack popped up from AoG Dev Community by Priyam stating about the 30 Days of AoG from March 1st, 2020.

Don’t have a clue what it is about so i have asked her what it is and what we will do she explained about the 30 Days of AoG challenge where everyone would spend at least 1 hr a day to learn AoG or develop action in AoG for 30 days.

I thought it would be great if we do something as a group. Even if we are not able to do it, others will push us to do things. so i told that i will join the challenge, Meantime Smit Jethwa, Ravi Rupareliya, and Sreelal TS has accepted the challenge

When there is only one day to start the challenge. I thought instead of doing some random things daily will have a plan and go with the plan

So i have created the plan for 30 days with one thing in mind (I should do things which are very harder for me)

30 Days of AoG Plan

With the initial plan, created a new Github Repo named AoG-30-Days like below

30-Days-AoG — Readme File

Everything was set on Feb 29, 2020, Here comes the

Day 1

Source: Giphy

With full excitement started to learn How to Design Quality Conversation for Google Assistant by looking at the Google I/O’19 video.

Day 1

Whatever i have learned on Day 1 documented and pushed it to Github.

Everyone has updated their status via twitter.

Day 2-8 Learnings

Source: Gfycat

Learned some of the core principles of how to create an action, how to design etc.,
This is the first time i am watching all the Google Assistant videos from Google I/O :)

Day 9-20 Experiments

Source: Giphy

Tried with some experiments in Google Assistant like Account Linking, Display current location, DateTime conversion, Interactive canvas

I learned some cool stuff during the experiments and learned how to fix bugs and tried to do root cause analysis for the problem. Instead of satisfying with the solution

I had a chance to look at the Virtual Pet Adoption action and its code by Mandy Chan. Took some best practices from there :)

Day 21- 30 Deconstructing Chatbots

Source: Gfycat

I started to watch Deconstructing Chatbots by Priyanka Vergadia. In fact, this is the second time i am watching this series. The first time i just watched the video and left, but this time i played with the codes and it was an awesome journey to fix issues and learn.

I have learned how to create a scheduler action which will create an event in Google calendar, How to store the response in BigQuery as well as refreshing some of the basic concepts of Dialogflow.

What i have achieved in these 30 days

• This is the first time i did a challenge online with some passionate peoples (Really enjoyed with this team, push from everyone :)

• Learned some new concepts as well as understand how interactive canvas is working

• The fear of doing something with Interactive canvas has gone off

• Learned how to do a root cause analysis for an issue instead of doing some random things

• Documented each days learning continuously

• When people get inspired by my blog and start to experiment. It makes me feel that my contributions help others

• Made the actions which have been taken down by resubmitting and made them alive again

• Got a chance to see how the great peoples are writing codes taking that approach in my action

What i have not achieved in these 30 days

• Though the final week plan is to create an interactive canvas action. Instead of doing that, I have taken Deconstructing Chatbots :)

Statistics

• Hours spent each day for learning & documentation: 1 hr 45 mins (avg)

• No of blogs written (30 days) : 3 (Can see the links below)

• Four new passionate people to work with

Reference Links

If anyone wants to see what i have done in these 30 days in detail. Feel free to look at my repo

nidhinkumar06/AoG-30-Days
Journal of what i have learned, played, created using Actions on Google for 30 days - nidhinkumar06/AoG-30-Daysgithub.com

Thanks Giving Time

Source: Tenor

I would like to thank Priyam for this initiative as well as Smit Jethwa, Ravi Rupareliya and Sreelal TS for joining in this initiative and pushing each other as well as Jessica Dene Earley-Cha, Mandy Chan, Priyanka Vergadia for the awesome tutorials as well as Google Assistant and Dialogflow for the wonderful documentations

The End

Source: Tenor

That’s the end of my 30 Days challenge in Actions on Google. But the journey has just started :)