As I reported yesterday at Search Engine Land, Google Assistant may use a third-party Google Assistant app when their primary first party responses do not return a result.
In the case mentioned at Search Engine Land, Colm O Sullivan asked his Google Home for the weather and Google didn't give it to him. Instead, Google said it can ask AccuWeather for the weather instead. Instead of Google giving him the weather, Google responded:
All right. For that, you might like AccuWeather. Want to give it a try?
Here is a video of this in action from Colm:
A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that what triggered this was "brief outage of our first party weather response." Instead Google "offered the AccuWeather Action as a fall back option for users during that short window."
So you know, AccuWeather does have a Google Assistant app.
I do wonder how Google decides which app to use as a backup or failover for their services. Google wouldn't tell me that.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
