Will Google's answer to Siri lodge in our brains the way its search box did?

Google is known for seemingly wild investments like stratospheric Internet balloons and face computers. This week it began a project that is less flashy but bolder: rethinking the conventional search engine that has become embedded into daily life and provided the revenue that made Google into a 546 billion behemoth. On Wednesday the company launched a virtual helper similar to Apple's Siri. Called Google Assistant, the awkwardly named aide exists only as a "preview" inside Google's new messaging app Allo, and early impressions show that it still needs work. But Google is committed to rolling out Assistant much more widely, in a bid to make us as dependent on it as we are on the search box.