Google Assistant gets Bard's AI features

Google at its ‘Made by Google’ event on Wednesday announced new updates to the Google Assistant. The all-new ‘Assistant with Bard’ comes with Google Bard’s AI capabilities. With new updates, Google plans to make Assistant more personal and responsive.

Google Assistant will now be powered by Generative AI

The new Google Assistant with Bard is powered by generative AI. Owing to this, generating responses and reasoning to different queries has become easier for the Assistant. Users can now interact with the Assistant through text, voice, and images. Furthermore, Google is also integrating some of the Google services with Assistant like Gmail and Docs.

“We’re building Assistant with Bard to be a more personalized helper that’s integrated with some of the Google services you already use, like Gmail and Docs – making it even easier to stay on top of the most important things in your life,” noted the Google blog post.

Assistant with Bard will be accessible on Android and iOS smartphones in the coming months. Google will offer a more contextually helpful experience on Android. Android users will be able to ask the Assistant about the caption of their new post that they want to publish on social media.

“Say you just took a photo of your cute puppy you’d like to post to social media. Simply float the Assistant with Bard overlay on top of your photo and ask it to write a social post for you.”

Google Assistant with Bard is currently in the early experiment and will be rolling out to early testers soon. It will still take a couple of months to arrive for the public.

In other news, the new Pixel 8 Pro, which was launched at the same event, comes with a slew of AI features. It is the company’s first smartphone to run Google’s foundation models directly on the device. Google confirmed that it comes with an upgraded Magic Eraser. Owing to the on-device models, Pixel 8 Pro can summarize audio recordings. It also exclusively has features like Smart Reply in GBoard and Zoom enhanced for cameras.