New 'Assistant with Bard' combines Google Assistant and Bard into one. Here's what that looks like.

Google is bringing Bard's personal assistant capabilties to your smartphone.

At the Google Pixel event on Wednesday, the company announced Assistant with Bard, which "combines Bard’s generative and reasoning capabilities with Assistant’s personalized help." The feature integrates Bard's conversational AI with Google Assistant to help with more sophisticated tasks beyond simple commands. In addition to voice commands, it works with text, voice, or images.

Previously, Bard was designed for the browser experience. Couched by its classification as "an experiment," Bard hasn't always been considered as accurate or advanced as OpenAI's ChatGPT. ChatGPT has an Android/iOS app, but Google has the advantage of millions of users already using its collection of apps, giving the company a leg up on sustainable adoption — as well as access to valuable user data.

Assistant with Bard taps into apps like Gmail and Google Docs to pull together information based on your request. It can catch you up on emails in your inbox, get directions from Google Maps, and put together shopping lists based on plans you've documented Docs. It is also multimodal, which means you can upload a photo and ask it for information related to the image — such as which way to go on a trail.

The feature will be available on Android and iOS, but it's more deeply integrated with Android. It works by floating a "conversational overlay" over your screen, which you can then use to type out or record audio prompts. Assistant with Bard understands the context of what you're asking so you don't need to explain the background of your request. Using Google's example of a picture of a dog, the overlay understands that when you request a social media caption "for Baxter," you're referring to the photo of your dog.

Assistant with Bard is coming soon to select testers, and will be expanding availability as an opt-in feature in the next few months.