Google says Assistant will be on a billion devices by the end of the month

As with Android, Google’s goal with its voice-driven AI helper, Google Assistant, is to get it onto devices. Lots and lots of devices.

And they’re making pretty damned good progress there. Ahead of CES this morning, Google dropped a little stat update: Google expects Assistant to be on 1 billion devices total by the end of this month.

That’s up from around 400M devices this time a year ago.

Google first announced Assistant back in May of 2016. By October of that year, they’d rolled it out to the Pixel/Pixel XL; nowadays, it’s on TVs, smart speakers, tablets, smart watches, and just about every new Android phone that hits the market.

It’s hard to know exactly how many actual users this translates to — but it’s definitely not a billion. On one hand, many Google Assistant users probably have it on multiple devices simultaneously, be it their phone, their tablets, Google Homes around their house, etc. On the other, many devices — particularly Google Homes — are meant to be used by multiple users throughout the day. Google will only say that active users are up “4 times over the past year”.

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