Google introduced its Assistant in 2016. Its a chatbot for searching the web, playing music and video, and many things more to even controlling smart home appliances.
Initially, Assistant was exclusive to the company's Pixel phone, Home speaker and Allo messaging app. In February 2017, Google announced that Assistant is coming to more smartphones running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and newer, and as long as they’re running Google Play Services.
When Google finally releases an update to Google's Search app, the Assistant will come with it. When it arrives, it should enable the new voice interface on all devices that can handle it. Google is also opening up the Google Assistant to mobile manufacturers.
The first smartphone to receive Google's Assistant is the LG G6. Nearing the end of February, the company is releasing Assistant to English users in the U.S., Australia, Canada and the UK, as well as German users in Germany.
Google is looking forward to bring it to more languages and countries over the year.
And on top of that, Google is also bringing the Assistant chatbot available on Android Wear 2.0-based smartwatches and as well as TVs and cars.
While there aren't much differences in functionality between Assistant and the old "OK Google" voice interface, Assistant is a new interface that is more like an messaging app than the typical Google search result, and is meant to be a more humanly Google.
Google Assistant allows users to talk to their mobile devices in a conversational way, providing answers to questions about practically anything from weather, flight and appointments.
As it can also control smart home devices, Assistant is also leveraging Google's Home, and putting itself head-to-head with Amazon's Alexa.
Assistant is one of the main interfaces for Google Search. But when the company made Assistant exclusive to Pixel phones, Google has limited capabilities in promoting the product to more users. But as the company decided to release it to more Android phones, Google has the ability to market the product to millions more users, or approximately 30 percent of all active Android-powered devices.
Tech giants like Google, Amazon as well as Apple and Microsoft are continuing their effort to promote their own assistants in an effort to being more users on board. This time, Google is set to make Assistant a household name.
Google said that its goal is to eventually "make the Assistant available anywhere you need it."
