Google will carry out a radical restructuring of the division responsible for the development of the Google Assistant voice assistant, said its head Sissi Xiao (Sissie Hsiao). The company wants to focus on developing the Google Bard AI chatbot, according to CNBC.
Image Source: Google
The Google Assistant division will leave its vice president of engineering Jianchang Mao for personal reasons, who, according to the head, “helped shape the Assistant as it is today.” His place will be taken by Peeyush Ranjan, who worked at Google for 16 years and oversaw the payments system in the company’s commercial division.
The Google Assistant voice assistant is an analogue of Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa – it is used on mobile and home devices, including Pixel smartphones, Nest smart speakers, smart watches, smart displays, TVs and Android Auto cars. As a result of the restructuring, Bard technologies will be more tightly integrated into the voice assistant system. The public release of Bard took place last week, but Google is rolling out the chatbot very slowly, while limiting its work to a small number of users in the US and UK.
As part of the restructuring, Vice President Amar Subramanya, who oversaw the development of the Google Assistant, will lead the Bard development team, and Trevor Strohman, who previously held this position, will continue to work as a “technical lead” with direct reporting to Xiao. Google has not yet told what will be the monetization scheme for the AI platform, the development of which required such impressive resources.
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