How would you improve Google Assistant?

Great question. I love the google asssistant, I'm one of those people who uses the assistant across multiple devices (Phone, Nest, Speaker, Car) and find it incredibly intuitive and easy to talk to. When I wake up in the morning, I wake up to the alarm that the google home rings in my room, look at my day's agenda on my Nest-Hub and clear out any reminders/To-do's I may have. If I head out, the assistant is in my car, helping me navigate to Starbucks on the way to work, or reading out messages/notifications I get during my long drive. 
 
That being said, I want to clarify a couple of things here :

1. Are we looking to improve it for a particular device/hardware? - Assume its open to discussion
2. Are we looking at improving the software functionality to ultimately improve the UX? Or do we have a metric in mind to improve (like acquisition, usage) ? - Assume user experience 
3. For problems like this, usually like to think of why we want to do this - did we see a drop in engagement, any user complaints, any recent competition from Siri? - Assume Nothing in particular, we are just exploring improvements. 
 

Google's Mission : Organize the world's data and make it more useful and accessible. The assistant fits perfectly with this mission since it is so helpful in organizing our day, finding answers and just being there for you. 
Also strategically, google has been moving more towards ambient computing. The assistant is everywhere. Which helps google get more data and improve targetted usecases.

User Groups : 

1. Kids 
2. Young Adults
3. Adults 
4. Elderly

Also, within these age groups, there are people with "accessibility issues" - Blind, Deaf, Speech impaired - all of who currently don't have a way to communicate with the assistant easily. 
Considering disablities can exist across all age groups, I want to focus on disabled users and making google assistant more helpful for this user type. Does this make sense? 

Focus : People with disabilities 
Painpoints : 
1. For speech impaired and deaf people, no way to intuitively activate and communicate with the assistant.
2. Awareness of surroundings - visually impaired people
3. Familiarity with featues
4. Privacy
3. May miss reminders or alarms or notifications

1 and 3 are closely related. I can assume that the same solution would work across mobile and google-nest-hub and focus on those 2 devices to solve these pain points (mainly because they both have a camera and screen to interface with) 

Solutions :  weighted with Impact  - effort  (Rated with L-Low, M-Medium, H-High)
1. Hand gesture based activation. M - L
2. Sign language interpretation.  M - H
3. Mood recognition. M - H
4. emergencies detection and help H - M
5. Navigating your surroundings using phone/camera and google assistant running in the background - H - M 

Considering 1 and 4 have Higher Impact and are related, I would focus on 1 and 4 for an MVP. 
The idea would be to activate the assistant either by waving at it. Alternatively, if any emergency (fall) is detected, trigger a vibrational alarm followed by call to closest relative or 911. 
Eventually, feature 5 can be added as an update to any exsiting camera.  Where the user can walk around with the phone open, and the assistant would help them navigate around by identifying objects around them and talking them through everywhere they go, throughout their day. 

Concerns v/s remidy
Privacy due to Always on camera: Have a toggle option to switch on or off the feature and level of trigger 
Power consumption if hand held device like phone is used : Use motion sensor in pair with phone to trigger (not a concern on nest hub)
False positives - incorrectly triggering 911 calls : have a degree of tolerence built in. 

Metrics to measure success :
Adoption - how many users with disabilities turned on this feature.
Trigger rate - number of times assistant was called by hand gesture.