It's only been three years since Google first introduced the Google Assistant, the AI-powered helper through which the company wants users to access its vast stores of information. There are at least two reasons it feels like it's been around much longer. The first is that even before the Assistant arrived, you could say "OK Google" to Android phones and get quality voice-enabled search and access to content on your device. On the surface, the Assistant felt like a logical extension of those features, not something new.

Beyond that familiarity, though, Google Assistant feels older than three years because it's probably the most important product the company has launched in recent memory. It didn't feel like that at first, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see that the Assistant ties into almost everything the company does -- which is fitting given Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The Assistant is the primary way Google thinks it can make all that data "universally accessible."

Google did take its time rolling out the Assistant, though. It was announced at the I/O developer conference alongside the Google Home smart speaker, a pair of products meant to challenge Amazon's successful Alexa-and-Echo combo. But Google Home didn't ship until the fall, and the Assistant's first introduction was in the ill-fated Allo chat app. Allo never took off, so its Assistant integration seemed as much as anything like a low-pressure way for Google to start publicly testing the service.

But when the Home speaker and the first Pixel smartphone arrived in the fall with Google Assistant on board, things started to take off. The Assistant wasn't initially as good as Alexa at running a smart home, but Google quickly closed the skills gap by getting hundreds of brands on board with its platform. And the massive amount of information Google catalogs meant that the Assistant was quite smart right off the bat, particularly at knowing what's relevant to its users.