AI assistants are so back

AI. AI? AI! AI… A. I. This has been a week filled with AI announcements from some of the biggest and most important companies in tech, all of whom seem totally convinced that we’re due for a revolution in virtual assistants. If Silicon Valley gets its way, you might never have to write an email, a line of code, or a joke ever again. All you’ll do is ask your all-knowing, ultra-helpful, maybe slightly too flirty virtual assistant, and it’ll get everything done for you.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we discuss all the AI assistant stuff OpenAI announced at its Spring Update event and the very similar stuff Google announced at its I/O developer conference the next day. Since the early days of Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa, the tech industry has been moving toward the same goal. Are flirty AI assistants really the future of computing?

After that, we talk about the rest of Google I/O, which was just the Gemini show all the way through. We try to make sense of the new AI Overviews and what they’ll do to the way the web works. They’re going to change things, there’s no question about it — the only thing left to find out is what’s on the other side.

Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about laptops and emulators and self-driving cars and iPads and the undeniable ways in which the app model is changing. With a bunch of developer conferences to come, too, there might be more change afoot.

If you want to know more about everything we discussed in this episode, here are a few links to get you started, beginning with OpenAI:

And on everything else from Google I/O:

And in the lightning round: