You can now talk to Google Assistant on your Nexus Player

The Nexus Player may have officially been discontinued last year, but that hasn’t stopped Google showing its venerable media box some overdue love as of late. The Asus-made device enjoyed a significant UI overhaul with the release of Android 8.0 Oreo in recent months, and now Google is bringing Assistant to the former jewel in Android TV’s crown.

For any Nexus Player users out there eager to get talking to Assistant, it’s not exactly clear how the feature is being added at the moment, although the folks over at Android Police seem to think that it may be delivered as part of Oreo’s November security patch. If that doesn’t work, your best bet is updating the Google app to its latest version.

Once Assistant is all set up, it can be activated by simply pressing the microphone button on the Nexus Player’s remote. If you’ve managed to lose your remote somewhere down the back of a sofa (it happens to us all), you can always install the Android TV Remote app on your phone and use that instead.

Read: What is Google Assistant? How can you use it?

Google Assistant has slowly made its way to more and more platforms since its debut on the Pixel and Pixel XL phones in late 2016, including Nvidia’s latest Shield TV player and selected Android TV-powered sets from Sony.

While it may seem like its taken Google an age to bring Assistant to the three-year-old Nexus Player, it still receives the somewhat dubious honor of being the latest device to enjoy support ahead of any Android tablet. Thankfully, it seems like the black sheep of the extended Android family will finally join the rest of its Assistant-enabled siblings in the near future.

Do you still use a Nexus Player for watching movies? Let us know your thoughts on Assistant’s latest expansion in the comments.