Nvidia's AI assistant can do basically anything now thanks to new IFTTT plugin

Nvidia's Project G-Assist utility arrived with a bit of a thud, but it's shaping up to get far more useful with a few new plugins. Joining the suite of sample plugins that Nvidia released alongside the local AI assistant, the company is adding plugins for Discord, Twitch, Google Gemini, Spotify, SignalRGB, and perhaps most importantly of all, IFTTT.

Nvidia's Project G-Assist is about to get a lot more useful

You still need powerful hardware to back it up, though.

Nvidia originally pitched G-Assist as an AI assistant for games. It could tell you which stats to spec into, what items you should grab first, or point you in the right direction if you were stuck. The scope has changed a bit since then. Now, G-Assist is a utility that gives you access to your GPU. You can tell it to overclock or power limit your card, graph performance, or answer questions about your rig. It's a pretty narrow window of usefulness, but that's where plugins come in. Nvidia has designed G-Assist to work with plugins made by others.

This new batch of plugins is the result of the past month of making G-Assist open to developers. Some of the plugins aren't that useful. For example, the Twitch plugin can check if a certain streamer is live, while the Gemini plugin just gives you access to Gemini (go figure). Others are more interesting. For instance, the Spotify plugin gives you hands-free music control, and the Discord plugin allows you to snap a photo or video with G-Assist and immediately share it with your server. If you really want to expand the functionality of G-Assist, though, you need to download the IFTTT plugin.

If you aren't familiar for some reason, IFTTT stands for if this, then that, and it's the de facto framework for automation. It connects hundreds of apps together in a seamless way, allowing you to program complex automations between devices and services without any code. Being able to access and execute those automations directly from the AI model running in G-Assist is fantastic and completely blows open what the AI assistant is capable of.

Although Nvidia has released its first batch of community-sourced plugins, it's not done yet. You can build your own plugins and submit them to Nvidia, and if they're useful, they'll be added to the GitHub repository. I've actually been playing around with building a plugin for Steam, leveraging Nvidia's free ChatGPT-powered plugin builder to understand how to get the plugin working and integrated with the local assistant. If you know a thing about Python, or you're curious to learn, I'd recommend giving G-Assist plugin development a shot. Nvidia has a page dedicated to new developers, even.