The first action which supports a subscription purchase with Digital Goods Transaction feature has been released in Japan. The name of the action is “セバスチャンとおやすみ” (Sebastian, Sleep Assistant). The Sebastian is butler, and he supports users to sleep and wakeup well by sexy voices. Also, by greeting of “Good morning” and “Good night” to the Sebastian, he records the sleep times.

I want to introduce the action for you. The press release is the following (Japanese only):

If you’re Japanese and you’re using Google Assistant with the ja-JP locale, you can try the action with clicking the following:

What is Digital Goods Transaction?

The Digital Goods Transaction is a feature for Google Assistant. If action providers want to integrate some purchase feature into their actions, the developers can apply the feature. Basically, there are two features to sell something from actions:

Physical Goods Transaction.

Digital Goods Transaction.

In the Digital Goods Transaction feature, you can handle the following types of digital goods:

One-time purchases only charge the user once. Goods sold as one-time purchases are called “managed products” using the Google Play Console.

only charge the user once. Goods sold as one-time purchases are called “managed products” using the Google Play Console. Subscriptions automatically charge the user on a recurring schedule. These include purchases like a monthly fee for premium features.

In the action above, the subscriptions model has been applied.

If you are a developer and you’re interested in the Digital Goods Transaction feature, see the following document:

How does the action work?

The Sebastian action brings users sweet phrases for each greeting from users with his sexy voice. The number of patterns of the phrases is over 330,000. The phrase becomes more sweet expression according to invoked count.

The sample dialog of greeting at waking up is like the following (actually Japanese is used):

User: Talk to “Sebastian, Sleep Assistant”.

Talk to “Sebastian, Sleep Assistant”. Sebastian: Hello, I’m Sebastian. I’m a butler in this home. So, how are you doing?

Hello, I’m Sebastian. I’m a butler in this home. So, how are you doing? User: Good morning.

Good morning. Sebastian: Good morning, sir. Have a nice day today!

The action will request for purchase after 7 days from starting the action. If users accept the subscription (500 Japanese Yen per month), the action brings the following features for the user:

The action records sleep time. The user can know actual sleep times and manage them.

If the user can’t start sleeping well, the Sebastian supports starting the sleep with some sweet phrases.

As the result, the user would be able to get more healthy.

Conclusion

I think that it represents a characteristic of the Japan market that what the first action supporting a purchase was built using an attractive character and its voice as content. But, I expect that more variety of actions supporting a purchase will be provided for users from now. I believe that it causes a big business market for Google Assistant.