Short answers, pulled from the story.
Google Assistant is a virtual assistant application built by Google for home automation and mobile devices, using artificial intelligence to hold two-way conversations. Unlike Google Now, the assistant it replaced, it can hold a real back and forth conversation using Google's natural language processing algorithm.
Google Assistant was unveiled on the 18th of May 2016 at Google's developer conference, alongside the Google Nest smart speaker and the Allo messaging app. It later expanded to other Android phones in February 2017 and arrived on iOS as a standalone app in May 2017.
Google Assistant launched using the voice of Kiki Baessell for its American female option, the same actress who had voiced the Google Voice voicemail system since 2010. Google later added Issa Rae as an optional voice on the 11th of October 2019 and John Legend as one of six new voices unveiled on the 8th of May 2018.
Google Duplex is an extension of Google Assistant, revealed in May 2018, that makes autonomous phone calls to book appointments or reservations by mimicking human speech. Critics raised ethical concerns that people might not realize they were talking to software, and privacy advocates flagged that its calls were recorded to help refine Google's algorithms.
In July 2019, Belgian broadcaster VRT NWS reported that contractors paid by Google to transcribe audio clips had listened to sensitive recordings, including private conversations captured by mistaken wake-word triggers. Google acknowledged that 0.2% of recordings were reviewed by language experts to improve its services, and Hamburg's data protection commissioner opened a procedure against the practice on the 1st of August 2019.
Google Assistant is being phased out in favor of Gemini, whose mobile chatbot Google unveiled in October 2023 and released in the United States on the 8th of February 2024. On the 14th of March 2025, Google announced Assistant would stop working on Android 9 and newer devices, on iOS, and on Google Nest hardware, remaining only on lower-end phones running Android 8.1 'Oreo' or earlier, or on Android Go.