While Google Assistant is going to be around for a while, the future of Google-powered digital assistants now seems to be Gemini. Gemini comes preinstalled if you buy a Google Pixel 9 phone, and you can install the Android app on older Pixels and non-Pixel handsets. There’s also now an app for the iPhone .

There are an awful lot of devices out in the wild with Google Assistant on them though – including third-party hardware that's not made by Google – which means support for the

Google is rolling out a new Spotify extension for its Gemini chatbot/assistant, allowing users to control their music playback using natural language commands. This integration marks the second third-party extension for Gemini, following the recent addition of WhatsApp.

Spotify is getting support for Google’s Gemini Extensions, which will allow users to search for and play music using the generative AI assistant with natural language requests. The extension was first spotted in the code of the Google app in June, and now it’s rolling out to compatible Android devices, as reported by 9to5Google.

Earlier this year Google announced that Google Assistant would be getting some improvements, all thanks to the Gemini AI. The idea is that Assistant will be a lot more conversational, so the user feels less like they’re talking to a robot and more like there could be a real person on the other end of the line.

Google is working on a new API for Android 16 that lets system apps perform actions on behalf of users inside applications. This new API is guarded by a permission that’ll be granted to the default assistant app, ie. Gemini on new Android devices.

Even back when Gemini was simply called Bard, we had the notion that Google Assistant was on life support. Now that Google has massaged Gemini into Android’s very core, we know that it will sunset Assistant sooner or later. Well, Android 16 might make Gemini much more of an assistant than Google Assistant.