Google went big when it launched its generative AI fight-back against OpenAI’s ChatGPT in May. The company added AI text-generation to its signature search engine, showed off an AI-customized version of the Android operating system, and offered up its own chatbot, Bard. But one Google product didn’t get a generative AI infusion: Google Assistant, the company’s answer to Siri and Alexa.
Today, at its Pixel hardware event in New York, Google Assistant at last got its upgrade for the ChatGPT era. Sissie Hsiao, Google’s vice president and general manager for Google Assistant, revealed a new version of the AI helper that is a mashup of Google Assistant and Bard.
Hsiao says Google envisions this new, “multimodal” assistant to be a tool that goes beyond just voice queries, including by also making sense of images. It can handle “big tasks and small tasks from your to-do list, everything from planning a new trip to summarizing your inbox to writing a fun social media caption for a picture,” she said in an interview with WIRED earlier this week.
Courtesy of Google
The new generative AI experience is so early in its rollout that Hsiao said it didn’t even qualify as an “app” yet. When asked for more information about how it might appear on someone’s phone, company representatives were generally unclear on what final form it might take. (Did Google rush out the announcement to coincide with its hardware event? Quite possibly.)
Whatever container it appears in, the Bard-ified Google Assistant will use generative AI to process text, voice, or image queries, and respond accordingly in either text or voice. It’s limited to approved users for an unknown period of time, will run on mobile only, not smart speakers, and will require users to opt in. On Android, it may operate as either a full-screen app or as an overlay, similar to how Google Assistant runs today. On iOS, it will likely live within one of Google’s apps.
The Google Assistant’s generative glow-up comes on the heels of Amazon’s Alexa getting more conversational and OpenAI’s ChatGPT also going multimodal, becoming able to respond using a synthetic voice and describe the content of images shared with the app. One capability apparently unique to Google’s upgraded assistant is an ability to converse about the webpage a user is visiting on their phone.
For Google in particular, the introduction of generative AI to its virtual assistant raises questions around how quickly the search giant will start using large language models across more of its products. That could fundamentally change how some of them work—and how Google monetizes them.
