Among others, Google Assistant is one of the vital use and ever-demanding service of Google. It got listed after Android in the “Operating System” section of the Pixel 3’s tech specs. Although, things got changed over time, and now the service seems to be on evacuation now.
Assistant in 2023
Although, the retrenchment is already made clear by this year since it already had a quiet 2021. Its warning sign is Google’s shutting down its Assistant Snapshot. Moving ahead, the second was the removal of the Assitant’s Driving Mode “Dashboard” back in May 2019. This has been recorded as one of the tremendous changes by Assistant over Android Auto.
Last is that Google stopped the development of Assistant Memory in June. The same proves to be a good idea as the Google app’s Collections feature is underrated along with poor UI.
Among all three Dashboards, Snapshot, and Memories, one of the common factors to be noted is the attempt to extend Assistant from its voice roots. While their primary claim to being supportive was centralizing relevant information.
Notably, a report depicts from The Information in October revealed how Google was going to “invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for cars and for devices not made by Google.” This results in cost-cutting by centralizing the various efforts.
The most notable result of the same was that Sense 2 and Versa 4 are not featuring Google Assistant. Even, it has been offered on the previous generation of devices. This has been the case on non-Pixel and Samsung wearables at the time of their launch.
Assistant is no longer
While at I/O 2019, the new Google Assistant that worked on the device was also introduced with Driving Mode. After the same, it seems like the company presents Assistant as another method to control your phone. The time is not very far away when it used to be very essential but it will never be the primary interaction method now.
Where Assistant is going
The announcement which Google has made this year is a clear indication of improving the core voice experience. On the Nest Hub Max, the user can now invoke the Assistant by just looking at the Smart Display. While Quick Phrases let you skip “Hey Google” for pre-selected commands.
Also, at I/O 2022, Google revealed how Assistant in early 2023 will completely avoid “umm,” natural pauses, and doing self-corrections as you’re issuing a command. Here the motive is to make the user experience more natural and hassle-free.
To make this happen, we’re building new, more powerful speech and language models that can understand the nuances of human speech — like when someone is pausing, but not finished speaking. And we’re getting closer to the fluidity of real-time conversation with the Tensor chip, which is custom-engineered to handle on-device machine learning tasks super fast.
