Google Assistant is about to get a major AI helping hand
Out of all the digital assistants on mobile phones and smart home devices, we have to say that Google Assistant is one of the better ones. This is thanks to Google’s ongoing efforts at developing its AI technology, making talking to Google Assistant feel more natural compared to some other digital assistants out there.
But now it looks like Google is working behind the scenes to make it even smarter. This is according to a recent report from Axios who got their hands on an internal email in which it seems like Google is ready to give Google Assistant a huge AI boost and power it using LLM technology.
“Since we launched Assistant seven years ago, we’ve built great experiences for the hundreds of millions of people who use it every month. And we’ve heard people’s strong desire for assistive, conversational technology that can improve their lives.
As a team, we need to focus on delivering high-quality, critical product experiences for our users. We’ve also seen the profound potential of generative AI to transform people’s lives and see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM technology, would look like. (A portion of the team has already started working on this, beginning with mobile.)”
To that end, Google will be reorganizing its teams that are currently working on Assistant, which will also result in a small number of layoffs.
It is unclear which LLM Google will be utilizing, but there’s a good chance it could end up using Google’s own PaLM 2, which is the language model that is currently being used by Google Bard, the company’s AI experiment that’s meant to compete against the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
If this is true, it might explain why Bard doesn’t have its own standalone app yet. Google essentially giving Google Assistant AI capabilities could eliminate the need for a separate app since Google Assistant is already available on the vast majority of Android phones.
Source: Axios