AI is coming for the Assistants. Following Amazon’s shift toward increasing AI’s influence on Alexa, Google is making similar changes to its Google Assistant.
In an internal email seen by Axios titled “Assistant vision and team changes,” Google Assistant’s Vice President Peeyush Ranjan and Director of Product Duke Dukellis outline how their organization will begin to “explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM [large language model] technology, would look like.”
The email underscores the “profound potential of generative AI to transform people’s lives” and notes that some team members have already begun incorporating LLM models into the mobile version of Assistant.
Ranjan and Dukellis also outline leadership changes across the organization and the consolidation of teams. The restructuring comes with “a small number” of layoffs, they say. Axios reports that that means “dozens of jobs… out of the thousands of employees who work on the Assistant.”
Google Assistant was introduced in May 2016, two years after Amazon’s Alexa, and five years after Apple’s Siri. Earlier this year, Google opened its own AI chatbot, Bard, to the public. No word yet on when Bard will eventually integrate with Assistant, but it’s safe to assume they won’t remain separate for long.
