‘Spotlights’ could replace Assistant suggestions
As Google’s focus on artificial intelligence turns towards applying it for ambitious, big-picture objectives, the company has kind of fallen out of love with its Assistant nameplate for the little bits of help users get out of the Google brand. Google Assistant on the web has essentially come undone. Now, it looks like there’s another place where Asistant has ceased to exist and that is Google Messages.
When drafting a message in a thread, you would find the Assistant logo on a few auxiliary services located within the + menu, including Weather, Restaurants, and Movies. Not anymore: those icons are now gone.
Need another example? Where in the Suggestions section of the app’s settings you would find Google Assistant making suggestions (duh) on what to respond with based on conversational context, those four little Google-colored dots no longer appear. Those suggestions include such information mentioned above — places to eat, what the weather’s like in a certain location, and what to see at the cinema.
Furthermore, it seems that a replacement for Google Assistant’s suggestions is in the pipeline as 9to5Google has surfaced settings pages for “Spotlights.” They look to do the exact same thing that Assistant suggestions did, but we do see an extra toggle here when it comes to integrating location information into those suggestions.
No word on if and when this switch-out will swing into action, but mark this down as another slope in the decline of Google Assistant’s prominence.
