Google very likely to rebrand Assistant to Bard ahead of release

Google is likely to replace the Assistant moniker with Bard before it launches the digital assistant later this year. Officially unveiled back in October during the Pixel 8 event, Assistant with Bard is scheduled for release in 2024.

However, Google plans to remove “Assistant” from the name and simply call it “Bard.” The fine folks at 9to5google have decompiled the latest version of the Google app and found that the app’s greeting screen has been changed from “Hi! I’m Assistant with Bard” to “Hi! I’m Bard.”

Not only that, but nearly all mentions of Assistant with bard have been replaced with just Bard. And since Google is now calling Bard a digital assistant rather than another version of Assistant, it’s pretty clear that the search giant is going for a rebrand ahead of launch.

The problem is that Bard is still an “experimental AI assistant,” while Google Assistant is an established product that’s being improved all the time. The decision to remove many good Assistant features last week was probably one of the steps Google needed to take before completely replacing Assistant with Bard.

This suggests that Bard will not come with all the features Assistant offered, although Google might promise to add many of them over the coming months. Clearly, it will take some time before Bard moves from the “experimental” status to a stable one, but it looks like Google is determined to make it work.