It was only a matter of time before all Chromebooks received support for Google Assistant, the search engine giant’s digital personal assistant that’s already present on a wide variety of devices. The Pixebook is currently the only Chrome OS device that comes with Assistant. That’s now changing as per Google’s promise. The company has made Assitant available on all Chromebooks in the Canary channel.
Google had promised previously that it would bring Assistant to other Chrome OS-powered devices in due course. It has been a bit slow to follow through on that promise but it appears that the company is finally putting its money where its mouth is.
Those who have a Chrome OS device in the Canary channel can enable Assistant manually by copying and pasting chrome://flags/#enable-native-google-assistant into the address bar. The feature, once set to enabled, will bring Assistant to life on the device. This flag will certainly be appearing in the Dev channel soon.
It’s pertinent to mention here that Assistant didn’t really get a native experience on the Pixelbook. It’s essentially the Android app that’s in a somewhat different design. It remains to be seen if this latest addition of Assistant actually brings a user experience that has been built while keeping Chrome OS devices in mind.