Google has announced that it will eliminate at least 17 features from its Assistant product, following news that it had laid off "hundreds" of employees from the division. The company is cutting "underutilized features" to "focus on quality and reliability, it wrote in a blog post, even though a good number of people may still rely on those functions. "Beginning on January 26, when you ask for one of these features, you may get a notification that it won't be available after a certain date," wrote Google Assistant VP Duke Dukellis. The company didn't specify how removing certain commands will improve Assistant, nor did it describe any specific quality and reliability problems. It did say, though, that improvements in the past were aided by user feedback, so it may have been receiving complaints about Assistant's core usability of late.

Google Assistant wants to help you get out of bed in the morning. The search giant has long given users the ability to set'routines,' or multiple tasks that are triggered by a single command, using its digital assistant. For example, when users say'Hey Google, good morning,' it will turn your lights on, brew your coffee and read you the news. Now, a new addition to Google Assistant makes it so that routines are triggered after you hit snooze on your alarm. Google Assistant wants to help you get out of bed in the morning.

Google Assistant wants to help you get out of bed in the morning. The search giant has long given users the ability to set'routines,' or multiple tasks that are triggered by a single command, using its digital assistant. For example, when users say'Hey Google, good morning,' it will turn your lights on, brew your coffee and read you the news. Now, a new addition to Google Assistant makes it so that routines are triggered after you hit snooze on your alarm. Google Assistant wants to help you get out of bed in the morning.

Google brought its AI assistant to Android Wear 2.0 last year, and has been adding features like Routines and Custom Device Actions ever since. Now the company is bringing a few new features to Assistant on Wear OS (as it's now called), including contextually aware conversation suggestions, auditory answers to your questions and actions for connected devices. You can already tell Google Assistant to control your smart home devices like, say, setting the temperature of your LG fridge. Now this feature is coming to your Wear OS device, too, which means you'll get to talk to you wrist to set your thermostat or turn on the Hue lights in your bedroom. Hearing the answer to a question via your watch speaker or Bluetooth-connected headphones can be more convenient than having to lift your wrist to see a visual response, too, and pre-set response suggestions will offer up things you might not think of when asking Assistant for the weather, for example.

A new rumor, which several tech pundits already have a hard time believing, suggests that Apple may replace its Siri AI assistant feature with the Google Assistant feature. Tech blog Androidguys reported the claim Thursday, suggesting that Google Assistant could replace Siri at some point, but that for the upcoming iPhone may have both Siri and Google Assistant as options users can choose. Still, several iPhone enthusiasts have already scoffed at the idea. The rumor comes at an interesting time, nearly one month to the day since Google announced Google Assistant support for the iPhone during its I/O Keynote presentation. With this support, iPhone users will be able to download Google Assistant from the Apple App Store, but Google made no indications that its Assistant feature would run on iPhones natively.

Samsung has high hopes for its upcoming new Bixby voice assistant and Apple has been planning 3D sensing capabilities for its next iPhones. However, It's unlikely that these new features will ready when Samsung and Apple launch their new smartphone models this year. The voice assistant component of Samsung's Bixby feature won't work out of the box when the new Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones go on sale starting April 21, according to an April 11 report by Axios.com. But other Bixby components, such as its visual search and reminder capabilities will be available. An unnamed Samsung spokesman told Axios.com that the voice assistant features will be available in the U.S. later this spring, the report continued.