The Curious Case of the Missing Google Assistant

Google executives hosted the company's I/O developer conference this week, an annual ritual that has in recent years centered on artificial intelligence. With OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot seen as challenging Google's search domination, Google CEO Sundar Pichai seemed intent on projecting the message that his company is still the leader in AI--and is speeding up deployment of the technology. Google's own chatty large language model, Bard, was the headliner, and it is now publicly available in 180 countries. Following along behind came about a dozen generative AI product features and experiments that can do things like help programmers write code, draft emails, or generate speaker notes for Google Slides presentations. But hardly a word was said about Google Assistant, the clunkily named and voice-centric AI assistant that was the company's previous AI champion.