Meet Google assistant: A new search platform, rather than a gadget or an app

Are you ready for Google assistant? Well, it’s not a device you can buy nor an app you can purchase. Rather, it’s a platform unveiled today by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, a name given to putting Google’s smarts into anything. As Google puts it, a new evolution fo Google Search. And yes, it’s Google assistant not Google Assistant.

For comparison, you can think of Google assistant as how Amazon has an Alexa assistant in the Echo, but the Echo itself isn’t Alexa. Similarly, Microsoft builds its Cortana assistant into Windows devices, will be bringing it to Xbox.

The move still doesn’t give Google’s assistant a catchy name like Apple Siri or the aforementioned Alexa and Cortana assistant. Heck, Google isn’t even branding the product as Google Assistant — upper-case on the Assistant. Rather, it’s “Google assistant,” with the emphasis remaining on Google inside.

There’s a potential concern that Google is missing a chance to give its an assistant a personality, which some people like. It’s certainly confusing with the whole lack of upper-case situation, which I think will likely change.

We’ll see. What’s clear is that people will be hearing a lot more about how all types of things have”Google assistant” in them.

For example, the newly announced Google Home voice-activated home assistant was described as having Google assistant built-in. Similarly, the new Allo messaging app was said to have Google assistant smarts, helping you automatically respond to messages or to converse with Google itself to get things done.

Specifically, Google assistant combines two things: Google’s expertise in extracting information from content across the web and from partners plus its machine learning smarts to understand what people are asking.

In one example, Pichai demonstrated a conversation where he asked Google about movies nearby, said he wanted them to be kid-friendly, got a prompt if he wanted to buy tickets and then had that transaction done.

This will be familiar to those who’ve been watching the tech news recently and hearing so much about “bots.” Basically, Google assistant is also Google’s bot platform — but Google never used the word “bot” that I recalled.

I suspect Google’s avoiding that because many of the bot efforts out there will likely fail, as the promise of some machine learning to accomplish some tasks proves more difficult than possible. There will be successes, of course. But by avoiding the bot name, Google potentially avoids being seen as going down a wrong path even as it walks the same.

So Google assistant? Google search but in a way people aren’t used to thinking about it, a search that’s even more conversational with you and one that aims to fulfill tasks, as well,

For more, see our live blog today and also Google’s blog post that also introduces Google assistant to the world.

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