Google Assistant could be doomed: division ‘reorganized’ to focus on Bard

Google Assistant doomed? Evidence is starting to pile up that the unit is rolling down the pipes. The latest news came from CNBC’s Jennifer Elias, saying that the Google Assistant division has been “shuffled”to “put more emphasis”on Bard rather than Google Assistant. It all sounds like the team is being reassigned.

We’ll get into the details of the report in a minute, but first, a quick recap of what Google Assistant has been through over the past two years:

• Google Assistant had eight major speaker/smart display hardware releases in the five years from 2016 to 2021, but the hardware release seems to have stopped. The last hardware release took place in March 2021. That was two full years ago.
• In 2022, Google removed Assistant support from two of its own product lines: Nest Wi-Fi and Fitbit wearables.
• 2022 also saw the publication of a report by The Information, which stated that Google wanted to “invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice search for non-Google vehicles and devices.”
• Google Assistant driving mode was disabled in 2022.
• Google Assistant’s “Internet Duplex”feature was also disabled in 2022.
• One of the main unique features of Google Assistant, Reminders, will soon be deactivated in favor of Google Task Reminders.
• Google Assistant has never made money. The hardware is sold at cost, there are no ads, and no one pays a monthly fee to use the Assistant. There is also a significant cost to the server to process all of these voice commands, although some newer devices have moved to on-device processing as a covert cost reduction. Assistant’s biggest competitor, Amazon Alexa, is in the same boat and is losing $10 billion a year.

Each of these developments could be ignored on their own, but together they begin to paint a familiar picture of Google’s impending closure.

A note from Sissy Hsiao, VP and Head of Business at Google Assistant, instructing the Assistant team: “As the Bard teams continue [their] work, we want us to continue to support and implement opportunities ahead.”It looks like the Assistant team is now backing Google’s code red in the fight against ChatGPT.

Combining Google Assistant and Bard would make sense if the two devices weren’t different products. Everyone was expecting Bard to somehow integrate with Google Search, like ChatGPT and Bing, but the product released by the company is a standalone “experimental”chatbot not related to search at all. Like ChatGPT, it can generate paragraphs of questionably accurate text based on what it sees online.

Google Assistant is a voice product that is primarily concerned with the accuracy of voice recognition, recognizing and performing verbal tasks such as “Turn off the lights”or “Set a reminder”, and “Active Computing”, or be available everywhere, on many devices, like the Star Trek computer. There is some overlap as both services can return responses, but the current Google Search-based Google Assistant response system is great for Google Assistant. Google Bard can generate paragraphs of text, but when those responses are read aloud, the Assistant’s shorter responses are better than just mumbling with a clumsy monotonous text-to-speech system.

The interfaces of Bard and Assistant are similar in that they both look like chat apps and therefore have similar monetization issues, but you’re really using both products for different purposes. If we assume that the idea of ​​the Google Assistant – a voice assistant that helps you get things done – is not completely dead to Google, you can imagine a future where Bard’s language model will help him figure out what you want to do, and that will be do, but it feels like the service years from something like that. However, the assistant today has no problems with the language model, only problems with voice recognition, and Bard will not help with this.

We’ve seen Google do this all the time – shutting down a good project for a replacement that isn’t ready or full of feature regressions. Bard’s development and Google’s AI strategy in general seem slow compared to OpenAI and Microsoft’s ChatGPT implementation, so maybe some extra hands will help. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to take resources away from Google Assistant to do it, but the service is just a money hole.