What you need to know
- The new next-gen Assistant is now available in five new countries in English.
- The new countries include Australia, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, and the UK.
- Google made the next-gen Assistant ten times faster by condensing it down and running it locally on the phone.
Back in May of 2019, we got our first look at Google's "new Assistant." While showing it off on stage, one of the main benefits was the huge increase in speed it would bring to the experience. Google accomplished this by condensing Assistant from over 100GB worth of algorithms down to only 500MB, enough for it to run locally on your phone instead of in the cloud.
By moving it to your device and running locally, the new Assistant promised to be up to ten times faster than before. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Unfortunately, even once it started rolling out, if you weren't in the U.S. or didn't speak English, you couldn't take advantage of it.
Well, the good news is that the new Assistant is now spreading to more countries. According to a post from the Google Assistant Community Manager, it is now available in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, and the UK as of December 12, 2019. However, it's still only available in English at the moment.
It's fantastic to see the new and improved Assistant rolling out to more countries. But don't get too excited just yet — even if you are in one of the six supported countries and speak English, you still might not be able to use it.
That's because the next-gen Assistant only runs on Pixel 4 phones, and it doesn't support G Suite accounts at this time. Hopefully, in the future, we'll see it roll out to more countries, phones, and languages with support for G Suite accounts, and then we can all experience how lightning fast it is.
