In addition to the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, Google also announced "Assistant with Bard." This is a preview of the future, and both phones will get additional voice improvements in the short term.
Google says it combines "Bard's generation and reasoning capabilities with personalized help from an assistant." This includes the Bard extension, which gives access to your Gmail, Google Drive, and documents to answer questions.
In one example, Google showed an Assistant with Bard — which is a mouthful — in response to "any important emails I missed this week." Each message has a bullet point, and Google provides a link to the original message at the bottom. At the same time, you can extract the event address and view it in Google Maps.
This new assistant can also "help you take action."
For example, let's say you just took a picture of a cute puppy and want to post it on social media. Just float the Assistant with the Bard overlay above your photo and ask it to write a social post for you. Bard's assistant will use the image as a visual cue to understand the context and give you the help you need.
From a UI perspective, Assistant with Bard's Dialog Overlay floats above the screen and accepts text, speech, or image input. It is no longer a piece of paper because preserving the context of the background is an important consideration. There's a huge amount of Material You thriving here, which Google considers "a whole new way to interact with your phone."
Google calls Bard's Assistant an "early experiment." It will soon be rolled out to early testers for feedback, before being publicly available on Android and iOS "in the coming months."
Ultimately, the company defines generative AI as "creating new opportunities to build more intuitive, intelligent, personalized digital assistants." This evolution comes seven years after the launch of Google Assistant.
A feature that goes beyond voice to understand and adapt to you and handle personal tasks in new ways. We think your digital assistant should make it easier for you to manage items large and small on your to-do list, such as planning your next trip, finding details buried in your inbox, creating a shopping list for your weekend getaway, or sending text messages. Everything is like a real assistant.