Old Android tablet owners rejoice! For Google Assistant will be available on your device to try and make your life that much more convenient. Tablets running Android 7.0 Nougat, 6.0 Marshmallow, and phones 5.0 Lollipop will be able to say “OK Google” and have the assistant pop-up.
Starting next week users in the U.S., U.K., India, Australia, Canada, and Singapore that have English set as their language will be able to use Assistant. Other countries such as Mexico, Italy Japan, Germany, Brazil, and Korea will follow suit shortly.
Google Assistant is direct competition with Alexa, Siri, and Cortana from Microsoft. Each AI has its own positives and negatives, Siri doesn’t work well with Gmail, Cortana seems to have problems iTunes. You can forget about Alexa playing your Google Play Music unless you want to pay $25 and Google Assistant has inherent limitations by not being baked into the iOS system.
None of these AI is miles ahead of the other, and preference depends on what ecosystem you currently nest in, but if you are someone who’s new to Google Assistant here are some cool things you can do with it:
- Open an app by name
- Play music
- Make a call or send a text
- Set alarms
- Send Daily reminders
- Toggle Flashlight, WiFi, and Bluetooth
- Google a question, then ask a follow-up question about that topic
