Google Assistant was perhaps one of the biggest things to come out of 2016 in the field of artificial intelligence. Google's voice-based virtual assistant was introduced along with the company's Allo messenger, and has since then been incorporated on its own Pixel smartphones, the Google Home speaker, and Android TV devices. However, apart from these devices, Assistant has not been made available to third-party developers. Unofficially though, anyone can avail the service through Open GApps builds, the popular Google Apps package provider.
According to Android Police, all GApps builds will now have the option to enable Google Assistant during installation from Friday, February 3. Prior to this, Open GApps made Assistant available to anyone willing to tweak their build.prop file.
Users will be prompted to enable the build.prop modification while using the 'aroma' zip. Those opting for a non-GUI installer can add the 'GoogleAssistant' keyword to the gapps-config file. Furthermore, Assistant will be available for build.prop Android 7 versions (add ro.opa.eligible_device=true at the end of the file). You can also enable Assistant on Marshmallow ROMs by installing an Xposed Module..
Google Assistant for GApps builds is currently an optional feature until it receives all the features of Google Now and replaces the latter. Open GApps packages can be downloaded from their site and the builds will include the option for Assistant from February 3.
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