Five months after introducing its digital assistant, Google is sharing the feature with Android partners, hoping the service can boost its odds to win customers from Apple Inc's iPhone. Until now, Google's Pixel smartphone, introduced in October, has been the only handset with the company's automated assistant. Investment bank Evercore ISI estimates that Mountain View, California-based Google shipped 552,000 Pixel phones in the fourth quarter last year in addition to 500,000 Google Home speakers, another device that already runs the assistant service, making the current accessibility to Google Assistant slim compared with competitors like Apple's Siri and Amazon.com Inc's Alexa. On Sunday in Barcelona, LG unveiled its latest phone, the G6, with the Google Assistant. Andy Rubin, the creator of Google's Android software, is working on his own smartphone hardware.

Source: The Star February 27, 2017 22:30 UTC