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When Google officially began shipping the new and updated Assistant on the Pixel 4 and 4 XL in October of last year, users were able to take advantage of the new, faster reactions of the Google Assistant on their phones. There were some caveats to the deal, however, and it turned into a bit of a sore spot for many. Users who didn’t want to use the gesture navigation, didn’t use English as their primary language, and those that had a signed in G Suite account didn’t get to play ball.
I was one of those unlucky people and I’ve actually never used the new Assistant as my daily helper. I see it on my wife’s phone all the time and regularly have to fight off a bit of jealousy when I do. It seems, however, that my little predicament might finally be coming to an end if reports from Android Police are to be believed.
A few of their writers and other readers of theirs have started reporting the arrival of the new Google Assistant on phones that were previously out of the loop. I have always understood the temporary limits of the new Assistant when it comes to language barriers and simple hangups like the navigation style. Languages have to be added to get the Assistant’s voice models shrunken down to live on the device and the animation and UI are laid out for the gesture navigation that shipped with the Pixel 4, so those two limitations are at least understandable.
The inability for the new Google Assistant to run on G Suite users’ phones has never made sense to me. G Suite users are the paying customers for Google’s services and it always seems like new features take longer to get to these users than to the standard ones. Though this roll-out hasn’t changed that at all, it is good to see Google finally get this new and faster Assistant on to phones of users that pay for their services.
For what its worth, I still don’t have the new Assistant on my Pixel 4 XL, but the sightings from Android Police and others on Reddit tell me that official support should show up from Google any time now, even though the official line from Google is that there is still no support for G Suite users. Though I doubt this is a random leak, it will be nice when Google officially makes an announcement. We’ll be keeping an eye out for it.
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