After confirming the same last week, Google has now started rolling out its AI-powered Google Assistant to eligible Android devices. If you are not aware, last week, the search engine giant confirmed that it will extend its personal assistant, which was limited to Pixel devices up till now, to all devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Android 7.0 Nougat.
For those who are unfamiliar with this, Google Assistant is Google’s own AI-based voice assistant which was first introduced on Google’s Allo App launched last year. Google Assistant can search anything on the web, perform certain tasks and even respond to various queries placed before it. It can discover content on certain apps such as YouTube or can even control the lighting from your smartphone.
Last week at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event, LG launched its G6, which comes with Google Assistant. Soon after, smartphones like Moto G5 and G5 Plus also claimed to have Google Assistant on board and then Nokia also joined the race confirming that all the announced Nokia handsets will come with pure Android experience and Google Assistant built-in.
Now folks in India, don’t get much excited as the Assistant will first hit the eligible Android devices in the United States, followed by English (language) in Australia, Canada, U.K. and also in German for people living in Germany. As to when will, the Assistant make it to India depends entirely on the people working in the Indian region. Nevertheless, we expect it to be soon rather than later as Google has been ramping up its support for the Indian market quite emhpatically.
To analyise as to how many devices will Google Assistant land on, Google’s latest Android distribution results revealed that about 32% of devices run on Android Marshmallow or Nougat which roughly transaltes into 500 million devices. Now though the entire rollout process will take time, this is a pretty major step from the search-engine giant and quite clearly Google is targetting Apple’s Siri and other personal assistants in the market. Last year at the Google I/O, when the company announced about its upcoming AI-powered personal assistant, both Apple and Windows made significant changes to their respective personal assistants. Now, with the roll out extended to some couple of devices to hundereds of million devices, it will be interesting to see if people adopts Google Assistant to their daily life.