Google is planning to bring its new on-device Assistant, which debuted with the Pixel 4 last year, to Chrome OS. The folks at Chrome Unboxed have discovered a new flag in the Canary channel of Chrome OS to enable on-device Assistant. While enabling the flag doesn’t do anything at the moment, the feature could be rolled out to select Chromebooks in the near future.
The ‘next-generation’ Google Assistant is capable of running locally on devices, and processing requests up to ten times faster. To make this possible, Google had to scale down its speech recognition and language understanding models from 100GB to just 0.5GB. The feature will apparently be on by default on devices based on “Kukui,” which is the codename used by Google for MediaTek’s MT8183 processor. This means the first Chromebooks to get the on-device Assistant could be the Lenovo Chromebook Duet and the Lenovo 10e.
