Google’s cost-cutting efforts continue, with further layoffs this week and reduced Google Assistant capabilities.
First, The New York Times says that Google fired off “hundreds” of employees in “several divisions” on Wednesday. Core engineering, Google Assistant, and the hardware division have all lost employees. According to the newspaper, “Google said that most of the hardware cuts affected a team working on augmented reality.” AR layoffs are surprising given that it is swiftly becoming one of the company’s most visible teams this year, as Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm partner together to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro. FitBit appears to have suffered a significant setback, with 9to5Google stating that Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, as well as “other Fitbit leaders,” have departed Google.
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Google has seldom let off employees in the past, but since January of last year, a renewed emphasis on cost-cutting has made layoffs more common. The purging began with the announcement of 12,000 layoffs in January, which took until at least March to complete. Then came other layoffs at Alphabet firms Waymo and Everyday Robots in March, Waze layoffs in June, recruitment layoffs in September, Google News cutbacks in October, and now these layoffs in January. There are also indications that further layoffs may take place this month, with a focus on the advertising sales section.
Next up is a Google blog post titled “Changes we’re Making to Google Assistant,” which lists 17 capabilities that will be eliminated from Google’s failing voice assistant. Google says these “underutilized” features will be “no longer supported” at some point in the future, with shutdown warnings coming on January 26.
The whole list of cut features—which is rather extensive—is available here. The most concerning news is that the Google Assistant is losing its prominent, default position on the homepage of all Android devices. The microphone button in the Google Search bar used to launch the Assistant, but it now merely sends your voice input directly to Google Search. You’ll still be able to launch the Assistant using what are essentially hidden shortcuts, such as saying “Hey Google” or long-pressing the home button (if gesture navigation is turned off), but this is a significant change that means the Assistant will no longer be front and center on Android devices.
The Assistant comes from the Google Search group and was originally thought to be the company’s and Google Search’s future. If the Assistant couldn’t answer a query, it would just direct you to Google Search, thus this change makes the microphone button far less helpful. It also emphasizes the gradual demise of the Google Assistant, which has fallen out of favor inside the corporation. (Android users who are unsatisfied with this could download the Google Assistant shortcut app.) Here are some of the features that will be removed:
- Google Assistant’s messaging feature, where voice messages would be sent to any phones and tablets in your family group, is dead. Audio messages will still play on local network speakers, but Google is no longer sending notifications across the Internet to Android and iOS.
- Google Play Books voice support sounds like it will be gone. You can still use generic audio-cast features from another device, but you can’t ask the Assistant to play an audiobook anymore.
- Setting music alarms—not regular alarms—is dead. Controlling a stopwatch—not normal timer support—is also gone.
- The death of Fitbit under Google continues with the removal of voice-control activities for the Fitbit Sense and Versa 3. A wrist-based Google Assistant is exclusive to the Pixel Watch in Google’s lineup, though that probably won’t last long either.
One problem with all voice assistants is that there’s no good way to communicate the hundreds of possible voice commands to users, so there’s a good chance you didn’t know most of these exist. Figuring out whether any given Google Assistant feature is available on a phone, speaker, smart display, car, TV, or headphones is also an impossible task. Some cut features I have never heard of include “managing your cookbook”—apparently there is a “Google Cookbook” of saved recipes available on smart displays and nowhere else. Google says it was previously possible to “send a payment, make a reservation, or post to social media” by voice on some platforms. When I ask the Google Assistant to do any of those things right now, it says, “I don’t know, but I found these results on search.” I’m not even sure where you would enter payment details for the Assistant to have access to (was this some iteration of Google Pay?) or how you would connect social media accounts.
It increasingly sounds like it’s time to pick out a nice plot of land in the Google Graveyard for the Assistant. On one hand, Google seems to want to shut this one down in exchange for “Pixie,” a voice assistant that will be exclusive to Pixel devices, starting with the Pixel 9. On the other hand, in October, Google promised the Assistant would be getting Bard generative-AI integration, so none of this lines up perfectly. It’s odd to be removing the Assistant from Android home screens, stripping it of features, planning a big revamp, and planning a direct competitor.
