The fate of Google Assistant has been an open question for more than a year. Once Google's crown jewel, the software was key to the company's mobile and smart home strategy. Five years ago, Google gave away its Home Mini speaker for free in an effort to expand its ecosystem.
But ahead of its Made by Google 2024 event next week, the company announced on Tuesday that Assistant will live on, at least on the Home and Nest side of things.
Google Assistant and Alexa got a lot of attention out of the pandemic as people around the world suddenly spent more time at home, but both Google and Alexa seem to have slowed down in recent years.
As many say, the smart home is dead, which is an exaggeration. Many Americans own smart home devices. Take a quick survey of your neighborhood and see how many doorbell cameras there are. But the promise of the smart home wasn't just one or two connected devices per house. It was a fully automated, connected home ecosystem.
There are many reasons why the whole world doesn't live in fully automated smart homes. First, smart devices tend to be much more expensive than regular devices. Also, the smart home market has been largely fragmented so far, as device companies have pushed their own apps and ecosystems. Bad experiences like these can permanently alienate consumers who were initially drawn in by the hype cycle.
The assistants at the heart of these games have each struggled: Samsung's Bixby and Microsoft's Cortana have disappeared entirely. Even Apple seems to have stopped promoting Siri. The proliferation of generative AI platforms like ChatGPT has suddenly made the last generation of smart assistants seem outdated.
Earlier this year, Google let beta users choose whether to make Gemini, its first-generation AI platform, the default assistant on their Pixel devices. While Gemini, with its penchant for putting glue on pizza, wasn't ready to completely replace the Assistant, it seemed like the days of its predecessor were coming to an end.
With new Pixel devices on the horizon, the Assistant's days on Android may be numbered, but for now, it has a place in the home: Along with the launch of a new learning thermostat and streaming set-top box, Google announced that the Assistant will remain in the home ecosystem driven by its Gemini models.
Exactly what role Gemini will play in powering assistants will likely remain unclear, but the most obvious application is natural language. Assistants like Alexa have long struggled with conversation; most interactions tend to be single queries, which is where generative AI excels.
“You don't have to phrase your question in a specific way; just ask it in the way that you're most comfortable with,” Google writes. “For example, you could ask, 'Is Pluto a planet?' and then dig deeper with, 'Are you likely to change your mind?' If you don't know the name of that song, just ask Google, 'What's that famous basketball theme song?' Or, your Assistant can leverage Gemini's generation capabilities to engage in fun conversations with family members during conversations, like, 'Help me back up my claim that Crocs are super cool. Mention their sports mode.'”
These specific improvements will be available to Nest Aware subscribers later this year as part of a public preview.
Other obvious uses for Gemini include the ability to summarize information, a feature central to Google's efforts to bring generative AI to its search service. Whether Google sticks with Google Assistant or calls it Gemini across the board is really a branding issue. Apple recently revamped its AI-powered Siri with a new Apple Assistant model. Google seems poised to do the same, at least when it comes to the smart home.