Earlier this year Google announced that Google Assistant would be getting some improvements, all thanks to the Gemini AI. The idea is that Assistant will be a lot more conversational, so the user feels less like they’re talking to a robot and more like there could be a real person on the other end of the line.

There are an awful lot of devices out in the wild with Google Assistant on them though – including third-party hardware that's not made by Google – which means support for the

Google is rolling out a new Spotify extension for its Gemini chatbot/assistant, allowing users to control their music playback using natural language commands. This integration marks the second third-party extension for Gemini, following the recent addition of WhatsApp.

While Google Assistant is going to be around for a while, the future of Google-powered digital assistants now seems to be Gemini. Gemini comes preinstalled if you buy a Google Pixel 9 phone, and you can install the Android app on older Pixels and non-Pixel handsets. There’s also now an app for the iPhone .

Even back when Gemini was simply called Bard, we had the notion that Google Assistant was on life support. Now that Google has massaged Gemini into Android’s very core, we know that it will sunset Assistant sooner or later. Well, Android 16 might make Gemini much more of an assistant than Google Assistant.

Google has fleshed out the Gemini app as a gateway to most of the AI capabilities the company has developed in the last two years, going as far as giving users an option to replace Assistant with Gemini.