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Google Assistant gets a shutdown date: 4 September, and Gemini takes the microphone

Google has told users by email that Google Assistant will begin shutting down on Android and Wear OS on 4 September 2026, with Gemini taking over assistant duties. The rollout will take a few weeks to reach every device, and once it lands on a given phone there is no way to switch back. The cut covers smartphones, tablets, Wear OS watches, headphones and cars running Android Auto. Assistant survives for now in vehicles with Google built-in, on Google Home speakers and on Google TV devices, which Google says will move to Gemini in later stages. The handover was originally planned for 2025 and slipped by a year. The reason was capability rather than schedule: Gemini was comfortably ahead on knowledge questions, summarisation and open conversation, but behind on the unglamorous work an assistant actually does most often — setting a timer, toggling a light, controlling the device in front of you. The extra year was spent closing that gap. It is a large bet expressed as a maintenance notice. Assistant shipped in 2016 and has run on well over a billion devices; replacing it with a generative model everywhere at once means every routine voice command now goes through an LLM. Google's current workhorse model, Gemini 3.6 Flash, has its own profile in the wujec.ai catalogue.