Motorola reworks its intelligent Assist app, brings Drive and Home functions to Moto G and E

Moto Assist featured

After debuting intelligent features on its flagship Moto X handset last year, Motorola is bringing some of them to its less-expensive handset models. On Friday, the company said it figured out how bring the Home and Drive modes in its Motorola Assist software to the Moto G and E phones, even though they don’t have the same sensors as the more expensive Moto X.

moto e assist

Drive automatically detects when you’re driving and can audibly tell you who is calling or read aloud incoming messages, which is safer than having to look at your phone. It can also announce your calls when it knows you’re at home. While these features may seem basic for a high-end phone, it’s not as easy to enable them on a low-cost device. The Moto X, for example, has extra sensors and digital signal processing chips that the Moto G and E don’t have.

So how did Motorola bring these to the G and E without adding hardware? It simply reworked the software to use the hardware that was available on the devices, which are priced at $179 and $129; far less than the $499 Moto X:

Challenging our own assumptions, we decided to try to create the same experiences but in a different way, relying on algorithms running on fewer microphones and no sensor hub. The team spent three months creating prototypes and writing algorithms and models that could possibly create contextual experiences for Moto G and Moto E. When the test results came back, we were optimistic. The team then spent another two months tweaking and refining the application so it could hit our quality benchmarks.

Motorola Assist is specifically for the company’s own phones and is available on the Google Play store. That lets Motorola update the app without having to wait for a full Android update to be pushed to the handsets. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve used a Moto X as my primary Google Android phone for the last 13 months; the Moto apps are like a bonus on top of the otherwise pure Android experience. It’s nice to see you don’t have to spend as much on a smartphone to get more smarts.

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