Why Google's fancy new AI assistant is just called 'Google'

On Wednesday Google kicked off its I/O developer conference by unveiling a series of new artificial intelligence-powered products, including a messaging app with a virtual assistant and and a home speaker with a voice interface. Given what we've seen in the explosion of AI assistants and software bots from other companies, you'd expect Google to brand these products' connective tissue with a personality and a name -- Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, and Microsoft has Cortana. Instead, Google's new AI assistant is just called… Google Assistant. What used to be known as Google Now, the predictive assistant inside Android, has been broadened into a bigger initiative to bring those capabilities further into the real world, bolstered by years spent building out its extensive Knowledge Graph and honing its ability to parse human language. It's an indication of Google's ambitions for the product that it wants us to simply call it Google. "We think of this as building each user their own individual Google."