Snapshot API overview

AI-generated Key Takeaways

• The Places and Weather contextual signals have been deprecated and turned off.

• The Places contextual signal is replaced by the Places SDK for Android for new implementations.

• Google does not offer an alternative functionality for the Weather contextual signal.

• The Snapshot API can be used to access other context signals like user activity, nearby beacons, headphone state, and location.

• The Snapshot API methods retrieve cached values and perform sensing if no data is available.

Deprecation notice: Places and Weather contextual signals

Warning: The Places and Weather contextual signals, exposed by the getPlaces(), and getWeather() methods, were deprecated.

• The Places contextual signal was turned off. Continued use of this signal was restricted to customers with existing implementations, through October 30, 2019. New implementations must use the Places SDK for Android instead of the Places contextual signal.
• The Weather contextual signal has also been turned off. Continued use of this signal has been restricted to customers with existing implementations, through January 31, 2020. Google doesn't offer alternative functionality for the Weather contextual signal.

You can use the Snapshot API to get information about the user's current environment. With the Snapshot API, you can access a variety of context signals:

• Detected user activity, such as when they walk or drive.
• Nearby beacons that you've registered.
• Headphone state, plugged in or not.
• Location, which includes latitude and longitude.

The system caches these values so that they can be returned quickly. If there's no data, sensing and inference are performed to return fresh state values. The Awareness API returns the existing data type for context types that have a public API.

Each context signal has a corresponding Snapshot API method. For example, to get the current detected activity, you call getDetectedActivity(), use a SuccessListener to get a DetectedActivityResponse, then call getActivityRecognitionResult() to return an ActivityRecognitionResult from which you can get the actual request data.

The following example shows how to get the latest detected activity:

        Awareness.getSnapshotClient(this).getDetectedActivity()
            .addOnSuccessListener(new OnSuccessListener<DetectedActivityResponse>() {
                @Override
                public void onSuccess(DetectedActivityResponse dar) {
                    ActivityRecognitionResult arr = dar.getActivityRecognitionResult();
                }
            })

For more information about what you can do with the request data, see Get Snapshot data.