Google presses its Assistant in vehicles with Anker Roav Bolt

Google wishes to get its Assistant software application in as lots of vehicles as possible.

To do that, the search huge partnered with Anker, the electronic devices business, on the Roav Bolt. The $50 gadget, set for release on Monday, resembles a Google Home Mini for your vehicle. It lets you gain access to the Assistant — the Google competitor to Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri — to bring up instructions, send out texts or make calls by utilizing voice controls.

Here’s how it works: Plug the gadget into an automobile’s cigarette lighter, and it couple with your phone through Bluetooth. It has an auxiliary jack you can plug into your vehicle so the audio circulations straight from the vehicle’s stereo. While it’s linked, you can command it to switch off your lights in the house, play a podcast or set a suggestion by stating “Hey Google,” the trigger words for the Assistant.

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The Roav Bolt, which was announced in January at CES, will be available Monday in store and online at Best Buy, and online at Walmart. It will be available in store at Walmart and Target in “coming weeks,” Google said.

Devices like the Anker product are key to Google as it tries to spread its Assistant far and wide. That’s crucial as people increasingly search for stuff outside of desktop computers and Google’s iconic search engine. The 20-year-old company wants to make sure it’s still the go-to source for information when it comes to voice searches and other types of queries.

As for getting the Assistant in cars, Google also has its Android Auto service. But the company’s strategy with the Roav Bolt is to be able to jury rig older cars with the new capabilities. It’s similar to what the company did with its Chromecast streaming device. With the Chromecast, the idea was to inject video streaming technology into older TVs that didn’t have it built in. All you had to do with plug in a small stick that looks like a flash drive, and you could watch content from Netflix or HBO Go.

Same idea with the Roav Bolt. Google wants to let people outfit older cars with its Assistant tech — particularly those vehicles without dashboard screens or entertainment systems. For cars that don’t have cigarette lighters, the company plans to make different devices that you could plug into other places in your car, Tomer Amarilio, a Google product manager, said last week during a demo in San Francisco.

“It’s bridging the gap,” he said. “We wanted to target people who already have a Google Home, but want it in their cars.”

At CES, Google announced the Assistant had hit 1 billion devices. But that figure is a little skewed, since the vast majority of those devices are Android phones, which come with the software preinstalled. Still, when I asked Scott Huffman, who leads engineering for the Assistant, where other devices could make up ground, at the time he said the biggest opportunity is in cars and homes.

“Between those two, that’s a lot of devices,” he said.