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Personalization drives product innovation, if google doesn’t get there someone else will. I can speak from experience in saying that with AI, google wants to be the platform company, underpinning other peoples products. They’d probably rather step away from the hardware as more ‘assistant’ tech gets folded into our everyday lives and provide general AI LLM models for others to purchase/use & build on than the other way around like they are today.

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I've assumed, based on the way Google treats hardware, is that it is a sandbox for them to try out an optimize features. Makes sense that in Google's perfect world they never have to create a device and focus on software.

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I love your analysis on Google's naming conundrum for their assistant. Their stance has always been to have a persona but no outward personality, like a name or avatar. Now with Bard picking up steam, the Google Assistant is experiencing a small identity crisis. It seems like they're buying themselves some time with "Assistant with Bard", to figure out what they clearly haven't figured out yet.

Bard in the meantime got access to the Google Suite products, too, which in a weird way competes with Duet AI, similar to how Bing Chat and 365 Copilot are cannibalizing on each other.

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