Google Conversational Actions

» see developers.google.com/assistant as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Google announced the platform on 4 October 2016, at the event where it also showed the first Pixel, and shipped it on 8 December for Google Home. The unit of work was called an Action: a conversation your code joined when somebody said Hey Google, talk to, followed by whatever name you had registered. The early partners were BuzzFeed, Quora, Domino's, WebMD, Food Network and the Motley Fool.

The numbers around it were the loudest thing about it and they were not real. Brad Abrams claimed over a million Actions at CES in January 2018, Google repeated the figure at I/O that May and again in 2019, and in May 2019 Kane Simms took it apart: the count folded in web pages indexed through schema.org markup, Android app integrations, smart-home device features and Google's own Gmail and YouTube hooks. Voicebot counted the actual third-party directory instead. It found 1,719 US Actions in January 2018 and 4,253 in January 2019, when Amazon had 56,750 Alexa skills in the same market. By the end of 2019 there were 18,826 in English, and then measurement more or less stopped.

The wind-down was unusually honest. Rebecca Nathenson posted the notice on 13 June 2022 and dated the end a year out, which is more warning than Google normally gives. Console analytics went first on 13 September 2022. The Transactions API, the only route to revenue a voice app ever had, was deprecated on 3 May 2023. On 13 June 2023 users and developers both lost access, Interactive Canvas games on the Nest Hub went with them, and the Actions Console closed for good on 13 July. App Actions and the smart-home surface both survived, because neither of them required a stranger to invent a dialog from nothing.

Smart speakers were the hardware this assumed, and in Turkey they were never an ordinary purchase. Google has no store here, Nest hardware did not reach Turkish retail, and the people I know who ended up with one had carried it home from somewhere else. So I followed Actions the way an engineer follows a category he is not a customer of: watching what Google was doing with speech recognition, reading the developer posts, never once saying the invocation phrase out loud to a device in my own house.

~ the record ~

~ discoverability was not a solved problem ~

In January 2020 Scott Huffman, the VP of engineering for Assistant, said it plainly to Voicebot: there is no magic, and discoverability is not a solved problem. In the same conversation he reported that Sundar Pichai was very much in a mode of doubling down on voice. Twenty-nine months later the platform was scheduled for deletion.

The problem was structural and everyone could see it. An app icon sits on a screen where you can find it by looking. A voice app can only be reached by saying its exact name, which means the user has to already know it exists, which means the directory is the only discovery surface there is. In October 2019 that directory ate itself: thousands of Actions vanished from the English, Korean and Dutch listings, more than 80 percent of them in some languages, and Google said a fix could take weeks.

~ what Nathenson actually said ~

The quotes from the 13 June 2022 briefing are worth keeping because they are a product manager describing a failure in operational terms rather than in press-release terms. App Actions, she said, was the best path forward for delivering the biggest return for developers. Voice-first was a fine addition to the world of technology, but detached from the other ways users already interact with the apps they use daily, it was not nearly as compelling. And the sentence that explains the whole shutdown: it is challenging to create a voice experience using Conversational Actions as a standalone product, because you have to start from scratch every single time.

~ Amazon did not do this ~

The Alexa Skills Kit is still open in 2026. Amazon has retired plenty of individual features around it and moved the storefront under Alexa+, but the third-party skill platform itself never closed, and six weeks after Google's announcement, on 26 July 2022, Amazon shipped new monetization and retention tooling for skill developers. Amazon's own cuts that year landed on the devices division in November, not on the skills platform.

~ the part that outlived it ~

Assistant kept running on phones and speakers for two more years after this, until Google announced in March 2025 that Gemini would replace it. Conversational Actions was only the door that outside developers came through, and it closed first. The reorganization that eventually finished Assistant off came nine months after the shutdown was already announced, when Sissie Hsiao reshuffled the Assistant organization around Bard on 29 March 2023. The language-model pivot did not kill voice apps. It just made sure nothing would come back for them.

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