According to Search Engine Land, it's a case of goodbye voice search, hello Google Assistant. The company is swapping out the familiar blue and red mic in favour of its Assistant on the home screen of Android handsets.



The article goes on to report that Google is looking to replace basic speech-to-text voice recognition with the technically superior Assistant:

Google Assistant already lives on one-billion devices worldwide. It's become Google's premium product over all devices and platforms, and the company views Assistant as being its cross-device weapon in the fight for long-term dominance over its rivals.


Earlier in 2019, Google started testing ads within Assistant results. Back in April, they confirmed paid-search ads would be shown "when relevant" by the Assistant.

Not only that but 'traditional mobile search results' look like disappearing. Google Assistant seeks to give users 'answers.' Increasingly, those answers are accompanied by visual information - rather than a list of links, as we've become accustomed to with search results.

Adobe recently found that 48% of consumers are using voice for "general web searches." Those numbers will only increase as the Assistant gradually becomes more widely used by people to access information on mobiles.