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posted by martyb on Monday January 07 2019, @11:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the Siri-ous-Alexa-competitor dept.

Google Assistant will soon be on a billion devices, and feature phones are next

As CES kicks off, Google has a massive presence: monorails, a booth that's three times larger than last year, and likely a giant pile of news to announce. But ahead of all the actual product news, the company wants to beat its chest a little by announcing some numbers. By the end of the month, it expects that Google Assistant will be on 1 billion devices — up from 500 million this past May.

That's 900 million more than the number Amazon just gave us for Alexa. But just like Amazon, Google's number comes with caveats. In an interview with The Verge, Manuel Bronstein, the company's vice president of Google Assistant, copped to it. "The largest footprint right now is on phones. On Android devices, we have a very very large footprint," he says. He characterizes the ratio of phones as "the vast majority" of that billion number, but he won't specify it more than that. Though he does argue that smart speakers and other connected home devices comprise a notable and growing portion.

[...] For Google, the next billion devices will come in emerging markets, specifically on feature phones.


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:02AM (4 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:02AM (#783520)

    Can you do that on a non-rooted phone?

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:05AM (3 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:05AM (#783522) Homepage Journal

    Thankfully, I have no idea. Why would anyone here buy a phone you can't easily root though?

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kazzie on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:02PM

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:02PM (#783643)

      In order to have a hardware keyboard on it.

      Blackberry make android phones with keyboards (that aren't out of my price range) but they also make a business out of ultra-securing their bootloader so you can't root them. I thought long and hard before eventually getting one.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @11:53AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @11:53AM (#784072)

      because they had the phone I wanted, with physical buttons, right type, and I trusted the vendor.
      I can't afford to brick it