Here's good news for Android phone users. Google has started the roll-out of its artificial intelligence-based Google Assistant to a large portion of android phone users. Earlier this week, Google had announced the Assistant will be made available to all smartphones running on Android Marshmallow 6.0 and above versions.
Google had launched Assistant at its I/O conference in May last year. It was first introduced only on Google Pixel and Pixel XL phones, and was later brought to Google Home. Plunging in to the war of AI personal assistants, the Assistant is Google's answer Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft Cortana. The Assistant will be made available in the latest update of Google Play, its app store.
It is like an artificial intelligence side-kick, on your hand-held devices, who knows you inside out. The Assistant can be considered an extension of Google Now, or OK Google available on Google devices. Besides helping you with mundane routines like sending messages, setting weather and news alerts on your Android device, the Assistant helps you plan a travel, pick a restaurant for dinner and organise your shopping list.
If you have no clue where to head for dinner, the Assistant can help you find nearby restaurants that suit your taste. If you want Continental cuisine, it will filter out a list, give you the timings, and even show you how to drive there from your present location. You can use the Assistant to add things to your shopping list, and even 'ask' it to remind you when you reach the mall. How cool is that? On a road trip, and wanna play some songs from your device. Keep your hand on the wheel and just call out a command: play music, and Assistant accesses the music files and plays it. How many times has it happened to us that we saw something fascinating on the way, but just didn't know what it is called. Take a picture and ask the Assistant which will look it up for you and open a new world of information.
Like many other artificial intelligence products, the Assistant is also designed to observe your regular replies, searches and past activity and learn from your behaviour. So much so that it can can even auto-generate or predict responses to regular messages, for instance a message from your spouse on what you want for dinner. Assistant can either reply, 'let's have Chinese', or even 'don't know', depending on cached earlier replies.
What's more, you can even have a conversation with it, through voice or chat. If you are feeling lonely, strike up a conversation with the Assistant and ask it 'where you live' or 'what's your favourite ice cream?' Or ask random questions like 'what's the capital of Botswana?' or 'where did sushi originate?' It is designed to understand natural language and will throw back witty replies, and further questions at you. Maybe even jokes, and poems. More reasons to stay glued to your phones for company?
To get the Assistant working, you require a phone that's running at least on the Marshmallow. According to latest numbers released by Google, about 32 per cent of Android devices in the world are running on Marshmallow 6.0, and above. This may seem like a small fraction, but it actually translates to nearly 500 million devices.
Rolling out the Assistant to all these devices is a laborious task, and will take time of its own. The roll-out will begin with devices in the US, and will be followed by users in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, and also for German users in Germany. Google assures that more countries will follow. Folks in India, we will have to wait for a while. Hopefully not really long considering that Google has been upbeat about its Indian market lately.
