Google supercharges its Assistant voice app with AI, hinting at how the company sees the future of chatbots

• Google is supercharging its Assistant app with Bard's capabilities.
• The new "Assistant with Bard" is designed to merge the voice assistant with the chatbot.

Google Assistant and Bard are starting to merge.

The company announced Wednesday that it was planning to bring its Bard AI chatbot into the Assistant app and experience, starting on mobile devices.

The result, a new experience Google has named "Assistant with Bard," sees Google making its existing voice assistant more personalized by effectively placing Bard inside it.

Assistant users can expect to get (or at least eventually get) the same Bard experience as they do on desktop, along with its integration of apps such as Gmail and Maps, but with the addition of voice input and output — and, importantly, on mobile. It's a way of rebooting Assistant with a new large language model that Google already uses to power Bard.

"While the Assistant today is really great at handling quick tasks, there's much more that we've always thought a deeply capable assistant should be able to do, but we didn't really have the technology to do that," Sissie Hsiao, a vice president at Google who is the general manager of Bard and Assistant, told Insider in an interview ahead of the company's "Made by Google" event.

What's most interesting about Assistant with Bard is it no longer sets voice as the primary mode of interaction. Instead, users are expected to see three icons on the screen — a microphone, a keyboard, and a camera — denoting three ways to interact. Hsiao said Google expected most people to default to text.

"You can use audio, but, really, we're moving away from voice as the primary modality," she said, adding that there was more "richness in pictures" and an ability to scan visual information faster.

There will be some other handy features. On Android, users will be able to launch Assistant with Bard in a box while viewing a webpage or an app, and ask it questions about what they're seeing.

Google is set to roll out an early version of Assistant with Bard to a handful of early testers this week, but Hsiao said a full launch was still "months" away. If users opt in, Assistant with Bard is expected to become the new experience when interacting with Assistant on Android or when using the Google app on iPhone.

The updates suggest Google is rethinking its Assistant product in the age of generative AI. The chatbot explosion this year has raised questions about the future of voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, and Apple's Siri, which have stagnated over the years (Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called them "dumb as rocks" a few months back).

Hsiao said that even within mobile, the team was exploring ways for Assistant with Bard to read back information more succinctly.

"People are using different modalities, and they don't want an essay being read to them," she said.

Hsiao wouldn't say whether Google planned to also upgrade Assistant on its smart home speakers.

"I think we're still exploring," Hsiao said. "It's too early to say definitively whether it will be useful or not."

Similarly, Amazon and (reportedly) Apple are working on rebuilding their concierges with LLMs. Even if these assistants get much smarter, the ways in which users interact with them may not be how the tech companies once envisioned.