Alongside the announcement of a software development kit in April 2017, Assistant has been further extended to support a large variety of devices, including cars and third-party smart home appliances.

Google has also announced that Assistant will be able to identify objects and gather visual information through the device's camera, and support purchasing products as well as sending money.

[24] On May 15, 2017, Android Police reported that the Google Assistant would be coming to the iOS operating system as a separate app.

This includes startups that broaden Assistant's features, are building new hardware devices, or simply differentiating in different industries.

[66][67] Through the use of the keyboard, users can see a history of queries made to the Google Assistant, and edit or delete previous inputs.

[69][70] The Google Assistant allows users to activate and modify vocal shortcut commands in order to perform actions on their device (both Android and iPad/iPhone) or configure it as a hub for home automation.

[71][72] In July 2018, the Google Home version of Assistant gained support for multiple actions triggered by a single vocal shortcut command.

[79] In April 2019, the most popular audio games in the Assistant, Crystal Ball, and Lucky Trivia, have had the biggest voice changes in the application's history.

[80] Google Assistant won the 2020 Webby Award for Best User Experience in the category: Apps, Mobile & Voice.

Duplex was created to speak in a more natural voice and language by incorporating speech disfluencies such as filler words like "hmm" and "uh" and using common phrases such as "mhm" and "gotcha", along with more human-like intonation and response latency.

[91] During the limited release, Pixel phone users in Atlanta, New York, Phoenix, and San Francisco were only able to use Duplex to make restaurant reservations.

[93][94] After the announcement, concerns were made over the ethical and societal questions that artificial intelligence technology such as Duplex raises.

[95] For instance, human operators may not notice that they are speaking with a digital robot when conversing with Duplex,[96] which some critics view as unethical or deceitful.

[97] Concerns over privacy were also identified, as conversations with Duplex are recorded in order for the virtual assistant to analyze and respond.

[98] Privacy advocates have also raised concerns around how the millions of vocal samples gathered from consumers are fed back into the algorithms of virtual assistants, making these forms of AI smarter with each use.

Though these features individualize the user experience, critics are unsure about the long term implications of giving "the company unprecedented access to human patterns and preferences that are crucial to the next phase of artificial intelligence".

[99] While transparency was referred to as a key part to the experience when the technology was revealed,[100] Google later further clarified in a statement saying, "We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we'll make sure the system is appropriately identified.

[102] PC World's Mark Hachman gave a favorable review of the Google Assistant, saying that it was a "step up on Cortana and Siri.

[104] In July 2019 Belgian public broadcaster VRT NWS published an article revealing that third-party contractors paid to transcribe audio clips collected by Google Assistant listened to sensitive information about users.

[106] On August 1, 2019, Germany's Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information initiated an administrative procedure to prohibit Google from carrying out corresponding evaluations by employees or third parties for the period of three months to provisionally protect the rights of privacy of data subjects for the time being, citing GDPR.