After years of singleminded worship of the false god Virtual Assistant, the company is rushing its AI strategy as its competitors join their hands and raise their pitchforks. In 2019, a rebranded and bigger smart display, AR search results, AR Maps, Google Lens updates, Duplex for the web (remember Duplex?), a compressed Google Assistant that does more locally, Assistant in Waze, Assistant in driving mode, live captioning and live relay (speech recognition) and a project to better understand people with speech impairments. But investor confidence has been shaken as it turns out that Google’s failure to innovate meaningfully over the last few years might not have been done out of wisdom and confidence, but reticence and pride