SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google Assistant will soon be on a billion devices, and feature phones are next [theverge.com]

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 [theverge.com]. 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.

Original Submission