The Open GApps Project is an open-source effort to script the automatic generation of up-to-date Google Apps packages. This is mostly useful for people flashing custom ROMS (which are not allowed to include Google's proprietary packages).
Android Police reports:
Google Assistant was introduced at Google I/O last year, as a more personal voice assistant than Google Now. Since then, it has been made available on several platforms - Pixel phones, the Google Home, Android TV, and Allo. But Assistant is still unavailable on non-Pixel phones without a special build.prop tweak. Now the Open GApps team has made enabling Assistant a little easier.
Google Assistant is marked as an optional feature right now due to it not having the full feature set of Google Now. You can download all Open GApps packages here, but keep in mind that only builds starting tomorrow will include the option for Assistant.
The original pull request can be viewed here.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @05:41AM
Put your minds behind open hardware; it will be junk at first, but it's the only way to escape the suffocating corporate grip on personal computing.