A ‘deeply committed’ Google working on ‘supercharged Assistant’ powered by LLMs

Abner Li | Jul 31 2023 - 1:57 pm PT

Google announced internally today that it’s updating Google Assistant with the latest LLM (large language model) technology.

In an internal email published by Axios, Google today made note of “the profound potential of generative AI to transform people’s lives and see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM technology, would look like.”

In fact, a “portion of the team has already started working on this, beginning with mobile,” which should be referring to Assistant on Android. To that end, we spotted Google Assistant for Android working on a generative AI-powered feature that could summarize web pages when you tap or say “Summarize this.”

Smart Displays and speakers are the other huge form factor and have a primarily voice-first interface. It’s not hard to see how Google Bard could translate to voice responses.

Top comment by TurboFool

Liked by 22 people

It can't get much worse than it's gotten. Commands that used to be understood with ease get more and more confused or misunderstood. I can't count how many times it's told me it's unable to do a thing it did yesterday, or an hour ago, often even suggesting I maybe instead try asking it to do exactly what I just asked (and its history shows it heard me correctly). A reasonable combination of the two technologies COULD be a major leap forward and fill in the gaps.

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Google said it recognizes the “strong desire for assistive, conversational technology that can improve their lives” from end users.

The rest of the email describes an internal reorg to support this new “Assistant vision” that includes dozens of cut positions. Axios reports that “thousands of employees who work on the Assistant.”

It ends by saying that Google is “deeply committed to Assistant, and we are optimistic about its bright future ahead.”

Google has spent the past year or two cutting legacy Assistant features, like 3rd-party Assistant voice apps/games and Conversational Actions/“Actions on Google,” which was the first way for developers to build for Assistant. Recent launches have not introduced any major new functionality.