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Google to Roll Out its Faster and Smarter Next-generation Assistant to New Pixel Smartphones

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Google’s I/O 2019 conference started yesterday and tomorrow will be its final day. The company revealed many new products on its first day, including adding one of the most interesting features to its Google Assistant, i.e., Continued Conversations.

Google-Assistant
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The ones who have already used voice assistants, including Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, etc. would admit that despite being the smart assistants, these are not as convenient as these are expected to be. In fact, these seem more like the text-to-speech features. These have been the best for carrying out the smaller tasks but never provided that natural communication experience to the users.

But now, the latest Continued Conversations feature of Google Assistant has been brought to provide the users that smart yet natural conversation experience. The company provided a demo of the new feature as to how it will help to simplify most of the tasks for its users. For example, the feature will help the users to craft messages and send to friends, search for a particular file to send it through email. The users can now ask the assistant to take a selfie, hail a ride as well as check the weather, simultaneously.

The company has revamped its old AI models for the assistant, by making it smaller, such that now the requests will be processed directly on the device, which earlier were sent to a remote server. This way, the new Google Assistant will respond to the requests 10 times faster than it used to do previously.

Most importantly, the company has eliminated the need to exclaim ‘Hey Google’ for every single request. Now the user will have to speak the two words only once to wake the assistant, and after the Google Assistant is active, they can give it the commands, directly.

Google is calling the new voice assistant as ‘next-generation’ Assistant, and this new assistant will be rolled out to the new Pixel phones at first, later this year. The assistant is smarter and can process the requests in real time, without annoying its users. The company has not commented on if the assistant will be available only for the high-end devices or for other low-budget devices too.

Google Assistant’s Expansion to Reach 1B Devices By the End of January

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The CES 2019 is already started, and even before Google’s real product launch in the conference, the company has made news with its announcement about the rolling out of Google Assistant, in more than a billion devices, by the end of January.

Google assistant

The google assistant is an AI assistant that runs on various Android and iOS devices, including the smart speaker, home hub, headphones, TV, smartwatches, etc. As of October 2018, the company introduced the same for the home gadgets and the home appliances such as dishwashers, oven, bulb, etc. According to the reports Google Assistant was already running on more than 500 million devices from 1000 different brands in May last year. And, for the last month, Google reported having over 900 million devices enabled with the Google Assistant.

It has been two years since Google Assistant was launched, in 2016, and following then Google is trying really hard to beat its rivals. In a revelation, Amazon has also reported that it sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices last year, making the competition further tougher for Google.

Google has also made some updates to the Google Assistant, along with the support for 22 new languages. From now on, it will also be available for 66 countries. It means, Google Assistant will be supporting 30 languages in total and will be actively working in 80 different countries.

There has been a significant change in the number of Google Assistant enabled devices since last January when the total number of users was over 400 million. The main reason behind the rising number of Google Assistant users may be the Android smartphones that also run the Google Assistant on them.

Manuel Bronstein, the Vice President of Google Assistant, said, “The biggest footprint right now is on the phones. On Android devices, we have a very, very big footprint.” Google Assistant has played a vital role in the growth of the company. Although the smartphone users may not be using the assistant actively, the home devices from Google are becoming really popular, and adopting the AI for its devices is really paying it off well.