If like yours truly, you rely on Google Assistant for various things from getting your lights turned off to turning on the dehumidifier to asking for random jokes when the day gets stale then you may have noticed that the Assistant’s interface is… always dark?
Like this:
This is always the case even if your device’s system settings are such that dark mode isn’t enabled. Why is that? Why can’t you change the Assistant to be… white?
Google has come out to explain.
A new page titled “Assistant Uses Dark Mode By Default” on the Assistant’s help section on Google’s support site offers a brief insight why that is so:
Google Assistant regularly tries new ideas to see what works and what could work better. This includes ways to make our products look and feel consistent throughout our product ecosystem. To offer a more helpful visual experience across all your devices, including Pixel Watch and Google TV, when you engage with Assistant on mobile Light mode is no longer available – it will now have a dark appearance, even if you have Dark theme turned off in your phone settings.
After years of its Android partners offering it, Google finally brought the ability to turn the entire system to dark mode 4 years ago with the release of Android 10.
Google Assistant is the main virtual assistant on Android-powered devices running Google’s version of Android.
Android devices running on forked versions of Android like those from Amazon (Fire OS), Huawei (Harmony OS) have their own digital assistants due to the inability to access Google Play Services which are necessary to run the Google apps that come with Google’s version of Android.
The former has its assistant, Alexa, which is quite popular even with users running Google’s version of Android due to its versatility and integration in many smart devices, especially smart home ones. The latter has its own assistant as well, named Celia that many are not familiar with since it entered the market after the ban on Huawei products in the US which has subsequently had adverse effects on the design, manufacturing, sales and distribution of Huawei devices since then.
Even device makers who load Google’s Android on their devices have their own takes on the digital assistant. Tecno, for instance, has Ella, which is currently in its second generation (it debuted on the first generation Phantom X). Samsung’s Bixby has been around for over half a decade now after Samsung had, earlier in the last decade, dallied with an inferior take of an assistant, S Voice.
Still, Google Assistant remains the virtual assistant that rules them all indisputably on the Android platform. When looking across platforms, it still remains superior to its peers, the aforementioned Alexa from Amazon, Cortana from Microsoft which has since been withdrawn from consumer use and Apple’s Siri which remains, at best, a dud. Good for everyday basic queries and humour and bad for just about everything else.
