Report: Pixel Phones Getting Personal AI Assistant Called Pixie

Things like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa are fine. They can follow basic commands and help speed up certain actions. While that’s cool enough, with all of the AI hype and advancement over the past couple of years, it’s now being reported that Pixel phone owners may soon benefit from a brand new AI-powered personal assistant.

Called Pixie, which is super cute but somehow cringe simultaneously, The Information reports that Google will release this AI assistant to both Pixel and Google hardware. That means we could possibly see it come to home products via its Nest brand, too. Running locally on the device, it seems like a safe bet that Google’s previous announcement of Gemini and the phone-powered Gemini Nano is essentially the groundwork for what’s to come.

Information on what Pixie can do seems limited, but if you wanted to speculate, I imagine it’d be like a more personalized version of Bard (or ChatGPT) that runs on your phone and doesn’t need the help of supercomputers in the cloud. After all, that’s the point of Gemini Nano. You could potentially ask it questions, it could read through your app data, and maybe manage nearly any setting on your phone. All of this would be great.

Nothing is confirmed for a release, but if I may be so bold as to make a prediction: Google I/O 2024 teaser/announcement, with first availability starting on the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro, then release onto older Pixel phones starting in winter of 2024. That’s my guess.

// The Information | Standard