Moto Assist and/or Tasker

[mm356]

I'm really enjoying the Moto Assist - most especially the driving and sleeping modes - but now that I'm getting spun up on Tasker it sounds like I could essentially do similar things through it as well (as a matter of fact it sounds like the Assist app in general may have been based on some of the most popular Tasker profiles). In general, other than the enormous additional configuration options you can add in Tasker, I was just wondering what trade-offs you may encounter in using Tasker over Assist. Is additional battery drain an issue? Is Assist optimized for use with the additional 2 cores while Tasker remains on the CPU? Basically just thinking out loud on the pros/cons of using each.

In an ideal world, I'd like to have Tasker trigger some tasks when Assist automatically detects that I'm driving. This way Assist can use the low power cores to detect my driving state, and Tasker can then be launched to do some additional stuff that Assist doesn't do. However, I haven't seen a plug-in ability for Tasker to detect this state from Assist (I tried triggering on the Assist app itself, but that doesn't work since I have to actually click the Assist app to go into its settings). Any ideas here from you Tasker pros?

 

[Kalifornia]

I'm playing around with this myself. I think you can use the notification trigger in Tasker to set up a profile that kicks off whenever Moto Assist starts up since it usually has a notification that is displayed. If you just want to do this for driving, you'll need to specify the specific text that displays when the driving notification is displayed (so that the tasks don't also kick off when you sleep...if you use Moto Assist to silence your phone as well).

I haven't tried it with driving but I was trying it with sleeping and I have a profile set up with the Event -> Notification with the Application set to "Assist" and the optional Title set to "Sleeping" You'll want to change the Title to whatever is displayed when the drive notification pops up.

Edit: Not sure how to clear this though. Whatever tasks you kick off will keep running since there is no way that I know of to set exit tasks so I don't think Tasker will be aware that you have stopped driving. There's another app called (I think) AutoNotification from the same Tasker Developer that may address this but I haven't played with it.

 

[JRDroid]

I've never enjoyed using Tasker or the like. I think they are overly complex. Assist does what I need it to.

 

[gsk3rd]

Not sure why assist for driving doesn't have a ability to launch a app of your choosing when "driving" is activated. We know they can do it because of the music app feature. Change it to launch a second app of your choice.

I hear awesome things about tasker but I agree it is way to complex for the average user, imho.

 

[CloudStrife7]

I am looking for the same thing. I want Waze to open in alert only mode when I'm driving and close when I'm not. Going to mess around with it but any assistance would be appreciated from someone more experienced.

 

[Kalifornia]

I am looking for the same thing. I want Waze to open in alert only mode when I'm driving and close when I'm not. Going to mess around with it but any assistance would be appreciated from someone more experienced.

I haven't used Waze in a while but I'm surprised they haven't offered this themselves to autolaunch when driving.

One option is an NFC Tag. Set it up to launch an app when you touch the tag and have it in your car. I don't know about launching Waze in alert only mode (not sure what that is) but you could at least launch Waze with a touch of your phone. Setting up a toggle might allow you to kill it with a second tap.

I'm by no means a Tasker expert as I've only played around with it myself but hopefully this helps of you want a more automated trigger.

You'll need to set up a "profile" that helps define how the system will know you are driving. There are a couple of ways to do this off the top of my head such as when your phone is connected to a car bluetooth device or, as I mentioned earlier, when the notification from Moto Assist comes up that you are driving. After this "profile" is set up you then define what happens next, which are called tasks. A task can be a lot of different things such as turn up the volume on your phone or launch an app. You can have multiple tasks run when the profile is active. Then you can also specify what happens when the profile is not active (this is called an exit task). In this case you might set up an exit task to kill waze.

I agree with other posters, Tasker has a bit of a learning curve but that's due to its flexibility. (Documentation out there is plentiful but targeted to people with coding experience). I'd suggest pocketables.com as a decent tutorial site though. It helped me ramp up.



Sent from my Moto X

 

[someguy01234]

If Tasker is too hard use Trigger, it's much more use friendly and can use Tasker's tasks in its profile.

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[garublador]

If Tasker is too hard use Trigger, it's much more use friendly and can use Tasker's tasks in its profile.

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The problem is that the OP wants to use the low power activity monitor to trigger tasks. It doesn't matter what Tasker like app you use, AFAIK Motorola hasn't supplied any sort of API or mechanism to access their low power core.

The AutoLocation plugin has the same type of functionality, but my understanding is that it does not use the low power core. I find it to be a very useful app even without the activity monitor, so it might be worth checking out anyway, but you'll may have to either ask specifically about it on the Moto X or use it yourself to see what it does to your battery life.