Google Assistant needs personality, and ‘Gemini’ is the solution

News Team

9 months ago

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.

It would prove to be a major exercise to change the name of a recognized product while also pushing people to change their habit of using the existing wake phrase on their phones and Nest speakers. Still, Google just won’t find a better time to roll out the name change than when it releases an improved version of Assistant that is supercharged with generative AI. The new Assistant could very well be positioned as a new product armed with the fascinating capabilities of Google’s LLM that does much more on your phone than the regular Assistant currently can. And it could help differentiate between the new and the old Assistant without needing that mouthful of a name.

But you should hold off from practicing uttering Gemini to wake the voice bot just yet because the name may add to some confusion as well. Gemini is originally the name of Google’s GPT-4 alternative LLM. And repurposing the same moniker for a consumer-facing product may complicate things, especially since the LLM has further complexity levels: Gemini Nano (the one that runs natively on the Pixel 8 Pro), Pro, and Ultra. Moreover, Google is prepping a paid version of Bard called Bard Advanced, so retitling it to Gemini Advanced would make it even harder to follow.

Assistant needs some love, nevertheless

There’s no doubt that Google Assistant has gone south over the last few months, with fractured services, and unreliable voice recognition and responses. Google has also been dropping some less-used Assistant features lately with the argument that it wants to focus on quality over quantity. Whether these steps are meant to make way for the big changes coming with the Gemini rebranding, only time will tell.

Google Assistant has nevertheless been left in the lurch for long enough that people have started looking for alternatives. We just hope Google gives Assistant the much-needed makeover inside-out to bring it back to its lost glory.