Yep. Google Assistant is going to be available for any phone with Android 6 or later. And it won't require a system update, which is one of the smartest moves Google has ever made.

Why? Because Samsung was never going to build it into the Galaxy S8 or any other phone it sells. Now the decision was taken out of Samsung's hands and left up to you to opt in if you want Google Assistant.

300 million Galaxy phones shipped in 2016 and most will be running Marshmallow or better.

Of course, it should be our decision because we're the ones paying way too much for phones. It's nice to sit back and think Google worked to allow Assistant to work through Play Services for everyone because it loves us and want us to have control over what's on our phones, but that's probably not why it did it. The 300 million phones Samsung shipped in 2016 (how staggering is that?) is why it did it. Without Samsung phones supporting it, Assistant would have quickly faded away.

I'm not saying that having Assistant on all those Galaxy phones means it will be a success. Just that it could never be without them. Assistant depends on user data even more than Google Now did and in a lot of different ways.

Assistant can do all those Google Now things like telling you about the weather or an upcoming flight. It's tied very tightly to your Google Account. You'll understand this when you read the agreement and accept the terms the first time you use it. (Please read it. Read them all.) But it also gets smarter with more user data of a less personal nature.