[Feature] "Play x" Voice Commands via Assistant/Gemini on Android Auto

[EspoTek]

What this PR Adds

As the title suggests, you can now say "Play x" on Android Auto and it'll play x on NewPipe - with slight caveats (see below)

WhatsApp.Video.2026-06-29.at.02.02.22.mp4

According to PR #12044, this isn't possible:

voice search from within the app works, but search from the google assistant (e.g., "play on NewPipe") only supports applications from the Google Play Store.

But that didn't stop me because I'm too lazy to read!

Testing and Caveats

I tested this on two devices in 3 configurations.

• My Pixel 5 running regular Google Assistant (not Gemini) and no other media apps such as Spotify "Just Works". You say "Play Chocolate Rain", it plays Chocolate Rain - no questions asked.
• My Wife's Pixel 7 running Gemini, and also with Spotify installed would play some videos, sometimes. Gemini seems to have a "safety" feature that blocks it from playing a video if you're driving - and what it defines as a "video" seems to be nondeterministic. For example, it will gladly comply if you say "Play Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday", but not "Play Chocolate Rain". And sometimes it doesn't enforce the safety feature at all and lets you play whatever you want? It's strange.
• Using my Wife's Pixel 7, but with regular Google Assistant, complies 100% of the time but will very eagerly try to route requests to Spotify. In order to get it to work reliably, I had to open NewPipe manually and play a piece of media. Then, all future requests would be routed to NewPipe until I played something on Spotify again. It doesn't look like there's a way to fix this, we can't define "play on NewPipe" without going through the Google Play Store process (OK, maybe I can read a little bit).

Who actually deserves the credit for this

All code written by Claude Opus 4.8 with some gentle steering on my end.
Unedited Claude PR text below:

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NewPipe's onPrepareFromSearch was a no-op (it returned ERROR_CODE_NOT_SUPPORTED), so voice "play <something>" commands in Android Auto did nothing. This implements it.

Changes

• Implement onPrepareFromSearch — search the selected service and play the top result. An empty query (e.g. a bare "play music") resumes the most recently played stream instead of erroring.
• Advertise the search actions in getSupportedPrepareActions() (PREPARE/PLAY_FROM_MEDIA_ID + PREPARE/PLAY_FROM_SEARCH), so the connector forwards both playFromSearch and prepareFromSearch.
• Add PlayMediaFromSearchActivity with a bare MEDIA_PLAY_FROM_SEARCH intent filter. Android Auto only routes a spoken play-from-search to an app that declares such an activity (see UAMP play from search not working on Android Auto (DHU): "Sorry, something went wrong. Try opening the app to continue" android/uamp#479); NewPipe's existing filters are all gated behind YouTube-URL data constraints, so AA never treated it as voice-search-capable. The activity also handles the direct intent (search + play) for automation tools.

Testing

Verified in Android Auto (Desktop Head Unit + a real connection) on Pixel 5 and Pixel 7: saying "play <query>" plays the top result.

Note / scope

This targets Android Auto. The phone Google Assistant/Gemini only routes "play on <app>" to apps in Google's curated media-provider catalog, so it won't trigger this for a non-listed app like NewPipe — that's a Google-side gate, not something the app can change.