Animal Shiritori

Google The “Action” for Google Home, “Animal Shiritori” (Old Japanese word playing game) was released in 2018.
Since then, 200 users have been using this feature everyday.
Shiritori is a game where people take turns saying words that begin with a Japanese character / letter which the previous word ended in. The game continues until a player ends the word with the “ん” (pronounced “N” or “m”) character as no word in Japanese starts with this character.

Our company started work with Actions On Google back in spring of 2018 when Google Home was first released to Japan. An Action for a few Japanese Rock Festivals and an Action to coordinate training for yoga using Google Home was produced by our company upon requests by clients. Consequently, this piqued my interest in creating my own Action for Google Home, which led to the production of “Animal Shiritori”.

The library of animal definitions did not include the animals - Koala and Meerkat. Due to this fact, there was a few angry feedback from the end-users regarding the missing animals. This was promptly fixed as the animals were appended to the list of animals.

Within the feedback we received, few end-users had raised concerns about Google Home replying with very obscure animal names which made users question the fairness against players. After considering whether or not to keep these obscure animal names for Google Home to respond with, my response was to keep those animals within the vocabulary of animals as I had my personal desires to learn about new animals through the game.

During these times of consideration, there came the good news. Google had begun the sales of Google Nest Hub which was Google Home with a display. The Nest Hub allowed developers to add a user interface for end-users to interact with, through the function of Interactive Canvas.

With the official release of Interactive Canvas, in Tokyo an event was held to teach how to create actions which would be integrated into the Smart Display. With the newfound knowledge, I immediately realised this was what Animal Shiritori needed.

Immediately, the data collection for habitat and images of the animals started. With the hope that the users will find the pleasure of learning about new animals to be greater than losing to Google Home, I collected as many pictures and habitat information for the animals.

2019 14th of November was when the new and improved Animal Shiritori was released with the integration of Interactive Canvas, images of animals and the habitat being shown while Google Home was in-play.