I'm curious how this will impact Siri's development. My understanding is that Siri has been (maybe still is?) somewhat ahead in terms of understanding language flexibly and naturally, so if Giannandrea can help them catch up on the things that Google is good at, could they leap ahead?
My uninformed impression is that Google Assistant is exceptionally good at the things Google-the-search-engine is exceptionally good at: Type/say an awkwardly worded query and get a highlighted (and usually correct) answer.
It's not clear to me how Siri gets as good at that kind of thing without the Google search index (and all the results quality work that has been Google's bread and butter for over a decade).
