Google Assistant now available on older phones, tablets

Google Assistant has come a long way from the early days when it was known as Google Now. The search giant’s answer to Siri is now powering things ranging from phones to speakers to watches and more, with the Google Assistant already available across a number of devices and languages—and now, it’s coming to older Android tablets running Android 7.0 Nougat and 6.0 Marshmallow and phones running 5.0 Lollipop.

The Assistant for tablets comes with features like making shopping lists (which automatically gets synced with your phone), set reminders, control your smart devices like plugs and lights, ask about the weather, ask questions and more. The Assistant for tablets will first be rolling out to the US users with English as the default language.

The Assistant for phones is already available for devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and higher with Google Play Services. Now Google has added older Android 5.0 Lollipop to the mix. We can understand the rationale behind this move as fragmentation is a major bottleneck with Android devices and sizable user-base is still running the Android 5.0 OS.

The Google Assistant on Android 5.0 Lollipop has already started to roll out to users with the language set to English in the US, UK, India, Australia, Canada, and Singapore, as well as in Spanish in the US, Mexico, and Spain. It’s also rolling out to users in Italy, Japan, Germany, Brazil, and Korea.