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The day Google Assistant died

“Allow me to reintroduce myself.”

Google started its annual hardware event in Mountain View with these famous Jay-Z lyrics this week, only to segue into a video showing off the capabilities of its new Gemini AI assistant.

The message was clear: Google Assistant is dead. Gemini is the new face of the company’s AI assistant efforts. Or, as Google’s hardware boss Rick Osterloh put it: “We’re fully in the Gemini era.”

That transition from Google Assistant to Gemini is first happening on mobile, with Google launching a new conversational voice chat mode called Gemini Live this week. But the company also has plans to extend Gemini voice chats to ambient computing devices like its Nest speakers and smart displays later this year, and is even beginning to bring some Gemini capabilities to its newly-launched Google TV Streamer device.

I went to Google's hardware event this week to check out some demos of Gemini on these devices, and get a sense of how the things Google is debuting with Gemini on mobile first could one day impact the company’s ambient computing strategy as well. I also caught up with Google Tablets, Health and Home VP Rishi Chandra, who talked to me on the sidelines of the event about discontinuing Chromecast after more than a decade, the company’s strategy to bring Gemini to ambient computing hardware, and the need to move on from Google Assistant.

“We launched Google Assistant in 2016 with ambitions for it to be the generalizable assistant,” Chandra told me. “Where we hit walls was the technology stack, which wasn't good enough to get there.”

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