Over the past months and maybe even years, people have anecdotally reported that theGoogle Assistantexperience has been getting worse for them. Google finally seems to listen, as it has announced today that it wants to focus on quality and reliability for its voice assistant. Unfortunately, the way the company does that by removing almost 20 features from Assistant at once, starting January 26.
Inits announcement, Google talks about how it’s improved Assistant over the years and made it easier to use it to accomplish various tasks. The company says that it achieved this in large part thanks to user feedback. Going forward, it wants to further improve the Assistant experience by “making a few changes to focus on quality and reliability.” However, the company isn’t introducing new capabilities — instead, it’s getting rid of “some underutilized features,” which will become unavailable from January 26 onwards. If you try to use them, you will get a notification that they are no longer available.
Ona support page, Google lists all the features that are going away, along with suggestions what you may do alternatively:
Google says that these are only some affected features, so it’s possible that even more capabilities are going away that haven’t been mentioned on the company’s help page.
While Google keeps emphasizing that it wants to make Assistant more helpful, it doesn’t mention what exactly improves as it removes the features. It’s possible that with fewer commands, there could be fewer misunderstandings and fewer false answers. At the same time, Assistant has been able to work with a plethora of commands in the past without hiccups.
The feature removal is the worrying continuation of a trend from the last year or so. The company alsoreduced the usefulness of Assistant’s “Read aloud” feature, removed Conversational Actions, killed the Google Now-like Snapshot, and discontinued Assistant games on smart displays and speakers.
Google Assistant is also getting harder to access
Along with these regressions, Google is also changing how you can access Assistant on your phone. You will still be able to use the “Hey Google” hotword and the power button long-press shortcut that’s available on many phones, but the microphone icon in the Google search bar will start a Google voice search rather than pull up Assistant for everyone going forward. Google says that this is the most popular use case, eliminating an extra step for many people.
The change is also in place for the search bar on Pixel phones, which represents a major de-emphasis of Assistant – it’s no longer front and center on your home screen. The change was alreadyspotted by 9to5Googlebeforehand, though the tweak was rolled back again ahead of the announcement. On iOS devices, you will have to use the dedicated Assistant app to pull it up rather than the microphone button in the Google app, too.
Preparations for Assistant with Bard?
During its Made by Google event in October when it launched thePixel 8 and 8 Pro, the company announced that it was planning to introduceAssistant with Bard. This revamped version is supposed to be more conscious of what’s happening on your phone, allowing you to prompt text generation based on content on your screen. You will also be able to ask contextual questions based on some data stored on your phone, like a summary of your most important emails or something like “Where is Grayson’s party?” when you know that the information is stored in some email conversation you’ve had with this person.
It’s possible that some features have been removed in preparation for the LLM-based improvements of Assistant. Google hasn’t mentioned Assistant with Bard at all in its announcement, though.
Google finishes its blog post with a call for feedback: “While Google Assistant has evolved a lot over the last seven years, one thing remains true: Our improvements are driven by your feedback. And we want to hear it. Just say, ‘Hey Google, send feedback’ and share your comments with us.” If you’re unhappy with recent changes, that seems like an invitation to let Google know.
