Newsletter
The Google Assistant has shown a lot of promise so far and if Google CEO Sundar Pichai is to be believed, the AI machine may become a stronger part of our lives than we can ever imagine. However, replacing a human pal with an AI machine may take a lot of research and years of experience to perfect, but the features that the Google Assistant arrived with show that Google have made a good start. As of now, the two challenges that Google needs to face up to is to make users feel that the Assistant is indeed better than competitors like Alexa and Siri and secondly, to make its promises come true in the long run. “We envision Assistant as a two-way conversation, a natural dialogue between our users and Google to help them get things done in the real world. We want to build each user his or her own individual Google,” said Pichai during the Pixel launch event in San Francisco.
The Google Assistant may, in a few years, turn into a perfect AI bot with answers to almost everything we desire, but it’ll be worthwhile to take a look at its existing capabilities on the Pixel, Pixel XL and Google Home devices. Firstly, it’ll have the capability to follow your conversations on your Pixel phone and come up with search results based on the topics that you discuss with others. Given that how much we talk to our friends and colleagues before planning on a dinner outing, a weekend trip or simply what movies to watch, this feature could be of great help to Pixel users. Secondly, you will be able to view photos from the past by asking the Google Assistant to pull them up by using keywords like names of places you’ve visited or events that you attended. Considering how difficult it is sometimes to manually dig up pictures from your drives, this will be a quick and easy way to get hold of them. At the same time, Google Assistant will also be able to do everything that other AI assistants do like making reservations, setting up calendar events, waking you up, creating lists, running instant web searches and so on.
However, there are a few things which hold Google Assistant back from being your truly universal AI assistant. Unlike Amazon’s Alexa, it can’t shop for you but will be able to run searches based on what you’re looking for, besides ordering your concert tickets. Yet another setback is that it is not available on devices other than the Pixel, Pixel XL and Google Home devices and the third limiting factor is that since it is pretty new, not many apps are presently integrated with it and as such, it is clearly not in a position to rival other market-leading AI assistants in the short term. However, Google is taking steps to counter these shortcomings and it will be a matter of time before it turns into a full-fledged AI assistant and is available in virtually all mobile operating systems as well as desktops.