Google is laser-focused on its AI efforts right now. It already has a large language model (LLM) called Gemini with multimodal capabilities and a user-facing chatbot in the form of Bard to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And Bard is consistently getting better by the day, as it recently got support for image generation as well. With Google’s changing priorities, Assistant took a back seat, leading to a fantastic voice bot, unfortunately, slowly losing both its features and reliability.
In the last couple of months, Google seems to have renewed its love for Assistant, with a promise to bring advanced functionality down the line. But what’s particularly interesting is that the awfully named Google Assistant with Bard could be renamed Gemini, which could potentially be the biggest thing that has happened to Assistant in years.
What’s in a name?
It couldn’t have been blander than Assistant
While we’ve always asserted how much better Google Assistant has consistently been over Alexa and Siri at regular tasks, ‘Google Assistant’ is, any day, an unimaginative name for a personal digital helper. This generic name doesn’t even prompt one to see Google Assistant having a personality of its own, while Alexa and Siri have proven that a virtual assistant doesn’t necessarily need to feel like a robot, even if it is.
More than that, Assistant has sort of a conflicting wake phrase, where you don’t call it by its name. To ask Alexa something, you call out “Alexa,” and the same goes for Bixby and Siri — Apple even did away with the need to prepend ‘Hey,’ leaving you with a simpler wake word: Siri. On the other hand, Google Assistant requires you to utter ‘OK Google’ or ‘Hey Google,’ and neither of these include the bot’s actual name, making it unnecessarily complicated.
It has always felt like Google was forcing its branding just for the sake of it instead of letting Assistant have its separate identity. Even Apple, which easily comes off as the more pompous one of the two, doesn’t make you call out its name over and over, and neither do Amazon and Samsung. If Google goes ahead with rebranding Assistant, the voice bot will shed the baggage of its parent brand and gain its independent personality.
The name is Gemini… Google Gemini
There is a but
At the Pixel 8 series launch late last year, Google announced that it is soon coming out with a version of Google Assistant boosted with generative AI called Assistant with Bard. That isn’t a name that easily rolls off your tongue, and Google knows that. It’s been brainstorming a new name for Assistant with Bard for a while now. First, it decided to call it simply Bard, but a new report suggests that Google could entirely replace the Bard branding with Gemini.
