What you need to know
- Having a G Suite account active on your Pixel 4 will default you to the old Google Assistant.
- The Assistant is currently a Pixel 4 and U.S. exclusive and only works in English.
- The new Google Assistant is up to 10 times faster and does most of its processing locally.
Update: October 21 7:50 AM ET:
Google has confirmed with us that it is working on making the new Assistant compatible with G Suite accounts. The company provided us with the following statement:
We're looking to add support soon for G Suite accounts (in the new Google Assistant).We can't share exact timing, but is something that's definitely top of mind.
As spotted by Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii, the new Google Assistant experience is apparently incompatible with G Suite accounts, making for an even more bizarre limitation for the revamped digital assistant than the ones we've discovered so far.
After being unable to access the new Assistant — ten times faster than the previous version — on his Pixel 4, Artem discovered that removing his work account from the device seemed to have solved the issue. Despite sporting a new look and blazing fast performance courtesy of its on-device processing, the new Assistant appears to be hobbled with various limitations at launch.
Alongside the above, the new experience is limited to only English at launch. It's also not available outside the U.S. (as yet) and, in an even more perplexing twist, is automatically disabled if you don't use the newfangled gesture navigation system on the Pixel 4, leaving disabled persons, tech neophytes and your grandpa at the mercy of an internet connection if they want to interact with their phone without the hassle of dealing with all those pesky buttons and menus.
That's not even considering the fact that the new Assistant will be a timed exclusive for the Pixel 4. Google wowed many with its AI prowess back at Google I/O — the new Assistant needs but 500 MB of storage on your phone to do what its predecessors used to require 100 GB+ and dedicated servers for. And that's precisely why it's such a shame that the company is putting up so many artificial barriers before those who want to experience its latest innovations firsthand.
Google's most sophisticated flagship yet.
Google is going all out in many ways with the new Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, two phones that are the very best of what Google can offer. Featuring lightning-faced facial recognition, a stellar camera that can take pictures of galaxies, and the brand new lightning-fast Google Assistant at your fingertips.
