Google wants to butt into your conversations.
The tech giant says that Google Assistant will be integrated into the default messaging app in Android in order to show helpful info cards within the text conversation. They feel that this will provide added value to people.
For example, if you’re talking about going to a particular restaurant, the messaging app will pull up a review of the restaurant from the Internet. If you’re talking about going to a movie, it’ll pull up info about the movie.
While I can see how certain examples of this idea might be useful, I can think of many ways in which it could be extremely annoying. I sort of imagine it as a third person listening to your conversation and jumping in with, “Well I heard that…” every three minutes. And we all know that Google’s (and Apple’s) predictive AI is not exactly perfect.
Google claims that Google Assistant does not send back the text of your conversation while doing this. They say that it is a device-based AI that does the work. So at least there’s that (assuming it’s true).
