Google Developing AI-Powered ‘Supercharged Assistant’
Google has consistently promoted its Google Assistant, initially popularized by Pixel phones, as a comprehensive solution to simplify your daily tasks—from setting reminders to conducting online searches. Recent indications suggest that it might soon incorporate generative AI capabilities to enhance its functionality and become an even more advanced version of the Assistant.
According to an internal email seen by Axios, Google plans to bring generative AI capabilities to Google Assistant similar to Google Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This change essentially revamps Google Assistant and opens up new ways for consumers to use the feature. According to Axios, development of this feature has already started for the mobile version of the product, and due to this change, Google is reorganizing different teams.
In the email, Google states that it has seen the impact of generative AI and sees “a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant powered by the latest LLM technology would look like.”
Google is making organizational changes and laying off some employees as part of its refocus on Assistant. Google’s Peeyush and Duke stated in an internal email, “As part of this update, we are also removing a few roles from the team. We have already notified these teammates and are helping them with this transition.”
It will be interesting to see how Google integrates its LLM with Google Assistant. For those who may not know, Google’s chatbot, Google Bard, runs on the PaLM 2 Large Language model. It’s possible that Google Assistant may gain functionality similar to Google Bard, but made to better fit the mobile interface.
Google Assistant was first introduced at Google’s developer conference in 2016. Initially, it was only available on the first-generation Pixel and Pixel XL devices.
