Google announced plans to give its virtual assistant generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

The AI-powered assistant will assist users with travel planning, email management, and the ability to ask relevant follow-up questions.

The Alphabet subsidiary announced during its hardware event in New York that it intends to include generative AI capabilities from its Bard chatbot into Google's version of a virtual assistant, which promises to offer individualized assistance with reasoning and generative capabilities on mobile devices.

According to reports, Google and several other tech companies have been engaged in a heated competition to incorporate generative AI into their upcoming or current products.

This year, companies including Meta Platforms, Amazon.com, and Microsoft stepped up their efforts in this area.

The Bard-ified Google Assistant will use generative AI to evaluate text, voice, or image questions and react appropriately in either text or voice, depending on the context in which it is displayed.

It is said to only work on mobile devices—not smart speakers—and will be available to approved users for an undisclosed amount of time. Users must voluntarily opt in. It could function on Android as a full-screen app or as an overlay, similar to how Google Assistant currently functions. It most likely resides inside of a Google app on iOS.

The Google Assistant's generative glow-up follows Amazon's Alexa's conversational transformation and OpenAI's ChatGPT's transition to multimodality, which allows it to answer with a synthetic voice and describe the content of photos shared with the app.

Talking about the website a user is viewing on their phone is reportedly one feature that is exclusive to Google's enhanced assistant.

The introduction of generative AI to Google's virtual assistant in particular raises concerns about how rapidly the search engine giant may begin implementing massive language models across more of its businesses. That might radically alter some of them, as well as how Google makes money off of them.