Google has reportedly restructured its “Google Assistant” team and laid off a few employees. Google plans to make a large-scale adjustment to Google Assistant, which will introduce the latest results of its generative AI and large language model.
Google’s adjustment indicates that the development of the voice assistant market has not met the expectations of the outside world.
Earlier this year, another company that develops voice assistants, Amazon.com, laid off employees in its Alexa department. Last year, amazon’s voice assistant based smart speaker department showed massive losses, and the high cost of the Alexa department is not unrelated.
Microsoft also launched a voice assistant called Cortana in the face of Alexa’s popularity, but it didn’t make much of a splash.
Google Assistant was first launched in 2016 as a strategic response to Amazon Alexa. At the time of its release, Google Assistant also sparked public concern and consumer welcome, users can use Google Assistant in Google’s “Home” series of smart speakers and “Allo” software, to ask a variety of questions.
However, Google’s two above-mentioned application of the “Google Assistant” product ultimately met with failure, and stopped subsequent development in 2019. According to an authoritative technology media, last year, Google cut some of the development projects of Google Assistant, which involves using Google Assistant to search on connected cars and third-party hardware devices.
On Monday, Google reportedly sent out emails to internal employees showing that future Google Assistants will use the new generative AI technology behind ChatGPT and Bard, Google’s homegrown chatbot and authoring tool.
This tweak will affect the way Google Assistant serves consumers in the future, as well as the ecosystem of third-party developers working with the tool.
Work has already begun on a new version of Google Assistant, and Google will first develop a mobile version of the product. As a result, Google Assistant’s staff has been reorganised, with around a couple of dozen employees being let go.
The Google Assistant project reportedly has thousands of staff members in total, so this is not a high percentage of layoffs.
Google vice president Peeyush Ranjan and product director Duke Dukellis said in an internal email, Google will still continue to develop the Google Assistant product in the future, but also firmly believe that it has good prospects for the future.
Like Google, Amazon has not given up on Alexa and is currently developing a new version of Alexa based on generative AI technology.
