Google Assistant With Bard Will See Limited Rollout To Pixel & Galaxy Phones

Google Assistant With Bard Will See Limited Rollout To Pixel & Galaxy Phones

When Google came up with the Bard AI, it isn’t exactly hard to figure that it’ll naturally integrate itself into the Google Assistant – for something like Bard, it perfectly fits the bill here. However, the rollout will be limited to a very small number of smartphones at first – from Google’s own Pixel 8 series to Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S24 next year.

9to5Google looked through the code behind version 14.41 of the Google app beta, in which the code points to Pixel 8 (and the Pro), with Galaxy S24 as another candidate model to use Google’s latest AI-powered toys. There’s also mentions of Pixel 6 and newer devices (powered by Google’s own Tensor SoC) as well as Samsung Galaxy S23 series in the plans, following the rollout on S24.

Currently, Assistant with Bard is in limited testing, so there’s a good chance you’re not seeing any of this even if you’re a prospective Pixel 8 user. The search engine giant did mention a bigger subsequent phase of testing will occur in “next few months”, and it’ll be opt-in – meaning users will have to actively enable the feature to use it. That being said, Google doesn’t conduct tests with Malaysian users, so you won’t get the chance to try it before the official release.

Pokdepinion: Looks like Google is aiming for on-device AI, which can be a good thing from privacy standpoints. That also meant rollout will likely be slow if there isn’t enough AI compute power on lower-end devices.