Google keeps on improving Assistant with relevant updates and a new one dropped just last week. The new update brings more visual changes in the answers that are provided by the Google AI and will provide more information related to the user query than before. However, users have started seeing ads in answers to their queries, says a report by Android Police. Now, thankfully, this doesn’t happen with all search answers as of now but depends largely on the nature of the query, like searching for nearby hotels and similar questions might throw up some ads your way. It is understandable that ads contribute to the revenue of Google but appearing at particular places like this can prove to be annoying.
Google’s official post announcing the update interestingly mentions this new change saying, “these results may include the existing ads that you’d see on Search today“. This was earlier spotted in February but at the time, Google said that it was testing the new feature and the search giant didn’t provide context at that time. Apart from the unwanted ads, the update will now enable more detailed visual answers from Assistant.
The blog post shares a few examples to illustrate this. For example, searching Alphabet’s stock will return a result that will include the latest price, change value, and also add a 5-year performance graph that could not be seen before the update. Another example is a query for “cutest cat breeds” that would show a number of categories also including images of the breed which wasn’t shown earlier. There are a few more examples of the feature on the blog post which is linked below. This new Assistant feature should be readily available on Android phones. The most recent update added voice recognition unlock to the lock screen, but for Assistant-only results, recently at the beginning of March.