After nine years, Google is officially ditching Assistant for Gemini

Google is finally ditching Google Assistant. The company says it will upgrade more users from Assistant to Gemini over the next few months. You won’t be able to download classic Google Assistant or access it on mobile devices “later this year.”

This won’t be for only smartphones. Google is planning to upgrade tablets, cars, and devices that connect to your phone, including headphones and watches, to Gemini. The company is also planning to bring a new Gemini-powered experience to speakers, displays, and TVs.

Google will reveal more details about its plans “in the next few months,” which will likely be at I/O in May. Until then, Google Assistant will continue to work on these devices.

9to5Google reports that handsets running Android 9 or earlier and having 2GB of RAM or less will still have access to the classic Assistant.

Google Assistant was launched in 2016. Gemini has been slowly getting new features and becoming capable of replacing Assistant. It was definitely not ready to replace Assistant at launch, but with the Utilities Extensions update and more, it’s definitely far improved than it was at release.

Further, reports indicate that the Pixel 10 series will offer Pixel Sense, a smart and contextual assistant that can access apps and media files, including text, images, AI-generated content, screenshots, and even metadata from those files.

Source: Google Blog