Google Is Finally Retiring Its Old Assistant, Two Years After Everyone Assumed It Already Had

Google confirmed this month it is retiring the original Google Assistant stack, moving remaining smart speaker, phone and car-integration users fully onto Gemini-based assistants. For most consumers this will land as a non-event: the transition has been running gradually since Gemini assistant features started replacing Assistant defaults on new devices, and the formal sunset mostly closes out a handful of older devices and third-party integrations still calling the legacy API. The more consequential part is for the developer ecosystem that built on the old Assistant SDK and Actions on Google platform, much of which was already deprecated piecemeal over the past two years. Any smart-home or voice-app integration still depending on the legacy stack now has a hard deadline rather than a soft one. The broader pattern — a company retiring its pre-LLM voice assistant in favor of a general-purpose model wearing an assistant interface — is likely to repeat across the industry over the next year, since maintaining two separate assistant architectures in parallel has been a cost center with no product upside once the LLM-based version reaches feature parity.