Google Assistant is already one of the best on-device voice assistants that you'll find. It tends to do better than both Siri and Alexa and now it's getting even more supercharged. Google has announced at its Pixel 8 series launch event that Google Bard will be coming to Assistant soon so that you can get generative AI responses to questions, while still retaining regular Assistant features, too.
How it works is by combining Bard's generative AI with normal Assistant responses. You'll still be able to do things like send texts, start timers, and control your smart home, but you'll be able to do more too. For example, Google showed how you could ask Bard to make a shopping list for a party at the weekend with ingredients to make smoothies too. At the end of it, you could export the entire output to a Google Doc that you can share with others.
Bard with Google Assistant isn't available yet, but you'll be able to access it in the coming months on both Android and iOS, and it will integrate with other Google services like Gmail as well. On Android, you'll be able to share a photo that you took with Assistant and ask it to do things with that photo, such as writing a caption of a cute photo of your dog that you took.
Early testers will get access to Google Bard with Assistant first, and the feature will roll out over the following months to more and more users. It's a new way to use Assistant on your smartphone, and it's the first of its kind to be integrated into a phone as well. While you can install the likes of Bing Chat on your phone or use ChatGPT Plus via voice, this is the first to be built into a phone, and for free as well.