Finally, Google Assistant comes with Samsung’s flagship smartwatch. Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
Samsung and Google have already officially released Google Assistant on the Galaxy Watch 4. As of today, you should receive an update to Wear OS with the ability to activate it on your Samsung smartwatch. The update also applies to Watch 4 Classic users.
Samsung has published a blog post announcing the Google Assistant update. “The latest operating system opens up access to Google Play, giving users access to some of the most popular applications in the Google ecosystem,” writes Samsung. The publication mentions Google Maps, Google Pay and YouTube Music, although these applications were already available. YouTube Music recently received an update to make it more usable on Wear OS devices.
I haven’t had the opportunity to play with Google Assistant on Samsung’s Wear OS yet, but the hands-free options will sound promising. According to Google’s support page, you can connect to it to control smart home devices, get information about your day, or start tracking running in apps like Google Fit. (I’ll be especially curious to see if I can set a default app to track my transitions since I converted to Samsung Health.) Smart Home controls are especially exciting because so far you’ve only had to rely on that. Samsung’s SmartThings (or any other third-party application) to turn the lights on and off with the Watch 4.
Google Assistant will also allow for more hands-free correspondence. This was technically possible with Wear OS in the previous iteration, but it was annoying. You had to tap the screen to bring out the keyboard, then tap the microphone button to start copying. In this case, you will be able to extract a message entirely through Google Messages, without first touching around – in the same way you would on any other Google device.
As for Bixby, it will continue to live on Samsung’s smartwatches at the same time as Google Assistant. If you’re deep in Samsung’s ecosystem, you may prefer Bixby to Google, especially if your smart home is rooted in Samsung’s SmartThings or you have a Galaxy phone.
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The update is a little earlier than we expected after last week’s Google Developers Conference, depending on where you sit. Samsung said the Google Assistant will arrive sometime in the summer, although it was just an update to the original announcement that it was on its way.
At the very least, this latest Wear OS update finally brings a much-needed feature to all Galaxy Watch 4 users. The land of Android is still fragmented. But the inclusion of Google Assistant in Samsung watches helps to bridge this gap only a little more.
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