Enlarge/ The lettering "Hey Google" on the Google pavilion at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in 2018. These words activate Google Assistant, Google's virtual personal assistant. (credit: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance)
Is the Google Assistant doomed? The evidence is starting to pile up that the division is going down the tubes. The latest is news from CNBC's Jennifer Elias that says the Google Assistant division has been "reshuffled" to "heavily prioritize" Bard over the Google Assistant. It all sounds like the team is being reassigned.
We'll get into the report details in a minute, but first a quick recap of the past two years of what the assistant has gone through under Google:
Google Assistant saw eight major speaker/smart display hardware releases in five years from 2016-2021, but the hardware releases seem to have stopped. The last hardware release was in March 2021. That was two full years ago.
2022 saw Google remove Assistant support from two in-house product lines: Nest Wi-Fi and Fitbit wearables.
2022 also saw a report from The Information that said Google wanted to "invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for cars and for devices not made by Google."
Google Assistant's "Duplex on the web" feature was also shut down in 2022.
One of Google Assistant's core unique features, Reminders, is being shut down in favor of Google Task Reminders soon.
Google Assistant has never made money. The hardware is sold at cost, it doesn't have ads, and nobody pays a monthly fee to use the Assistant. There's also the significant server cost to process all those voice commands, though some newer devices have moved to on-device processing in a stealthy cost-cutting move. The Assistant's biggest competitor, Amazon Alexa, is in the same boat and loses $10 billion a year.
Each one of those developments could maybe be dismissed individually, but together they start to paint the familiar picture of a looming Google shutdown.
