Last year Google announced a new Google Assistant but the catch was, for some reason, it was not available to anyone who had a G-Suite account on their phone. At the time it seemed a strange decision given Google’s push for so many businesses and schools to use their G-Suite but now it seems to be rolling out to G-suite users, finally.
Although the Google support page still states that the new Assistant UI will not work if you have a G-suite account on your phone/device there have been reports of users seeing the new interface popping up on their devices.
At this stage we are yet to see it arrive on our G-Suite loaded devices here at Ausdroid which suggests a staged rollout but the folks over at Android Police have seen it land on theirs. A staged rollout makes sense as we are sure there was some kind of technical reason why Assistant wasn’t on these devices beforehand and they’d want to see if it breaks anything on the G-Suite side before a wider rollout.
The new Assistant UI brings with it continuous conversation, the ability to reply to texts in Messages or WhatsApp, find and share images in Google Photos, find content within YouTube, Gmail and Maps, the ability to open a website and more. You can also control many of the features within Chrome using Assistant (eg. go to a website, open a new tab, close this tab, go back, reload, open history and more).
For those of you with phones who have the ability to run the new Assistant along with G-Suite accounts keep an eye out for the new Assistant UI arriving on your device soon.
It wasn’t the reason I moved away from gsuite but I did get sick of dealing with all the compatibility issues between google smart home devices and services and my gsuite account. Since I have separated out my business accounts (to office365) and kept my personal my life has been much easier.
I’ve got it here on my Pixel 4