Google has announced that it will remove at least 17 features from its assistant product after it was revealed that the department had laid off "hundreds" of employees. The company wrote in a blog post that it is cutting "underutilized features" to "focus on quality and reliability," although a lot of people may still rely on them.
"Starting January 26, when you request one of these features, you may receive a notification that the feature will not be available after a certain date," Duke Duquellis, assistant vice president at Google, wrote. ”
The company did not specify how the removal of certain commands would improve the assistant, nor did it describe any specific quality and reliability issues. It does, though, say that past improvements have been made with the help of user feedback, so it may have received complaints about the usability of Assistant Core recently.
The 17 features that were removed included: access or manage your recipes; Send emails,** or audio messages in your voice; Use your voice to reschedule events on Google Calendar; and the app launcher in Google Assistant driving mode on Google Maps to read and send messages, dial ** and *** bodies. It also describes what else the assistant can do in relation to these features, or an alternative way to do them. Here's a list, although Google says they're just "some" of the affected features.
The company has also changed the way the assistant works on mobile phones. The microphone icon in Google's search bar will no longer pull up the assistant and will simply launch Google voice search, "which is its most popular use case," Ducquelis wrote. "Hey, Google" hot words and long press the power button will continue to activate the assistant.
In the last year 1After 20,000 people, Google said it planned to focus on AI in the future, so it's interesting to note that one of its earlier AI products is being cut. Earlier today, Google confirmed that it has laid off hundreds of people from at least three departments, including assistants, hardware equipment, and core engineering.
At the Pixel 8 launch event in October, the company announced plans to launch "Assistant with Bard," a version that can generate personalized answers based on events, dates and conversations stored on the phone. However, Google hasn't said whether this version is related to the current cuts in assistant features.