Google’s new Pixel 9 lineup of phones will be different from all other Android phones in one big way: The default assistant on these devices will be Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, not Google Assistant. “On mobile, Gemini is an evolution of the Assistant,” Sissie Hsiao, Google’s vice president and general manager of Gemini Experiences, told Engadget in an interview. “Users can go back to the classic Google Assistant, but this is the new Assistant now.”
Hsiao just answered a question that has swirled since May when Google announced that it was building Gemini right into Android: What happens to Google Assistant? Hsiao said that Gemini, which is powered by Google’s own family of large language models, would be compatible with everything that the classic Google Assistant could do.
This means that you can ask Gemini to do simple things like turn on the lights or play music, or you can pose more complex questions like “What’s the weather on the weekend in Mountain View and San Francisco, and which one is hotter?” to decide which place you want to visit.
“It’s much more powerful, even for the things that people used to do in the old Assistant,” said Hsiao. “It’s really a huge generative AI evolution of that product. It can do all the generative AI things like image generation and text generation, but it can also do all the things of the past in this much richer, much more fluid way.”
To be clear, you can still use Gemini as your assistant on most current Android phones, Pixels or otherwise — but only if you opt in. You must first fire up Google Assistant and tell it to replace itself with Gemini when asked.
Google has previously refrained from answering whether Gemini will replace Google Assistant in the future. “The way to look at it is that Gemini is an opt-in experience on the phone,” Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem at Google, told Wired back in May. “I think obviously over time Gemini is becoming more advanced and is evolving. We don’t have anything to announce today, but there is a choice for consumers if they want to opt into this new AI-powered assistant. They can try it out and we are seeing that people are doing that and we’re getting a lot of great feedback.”
Catch up on all the news from Google’s Pixel 9 launch event right here!
