Google says ‘Beauty and The Beast’ message read by Google Assistant wasn’t meant to be an ad

Google Assistant or Google Now allegedly promoted the upcoming flick Beauty and the Beast. Even though promoting is not an offence but the social media definitely took offence to it and bashed Google for advertising the movie. The action was noticed and reported on Reddit by some users. They said when Google Now was asked for a summary of a user’s day events, it suggested about the movie irrespective of the whether the user is interested or not.

The social media was hugely disappointed to see Google promoting the movie. Not everyone got this promotional message though. The users who received it said that the message was, “By the way, Disney’s live action Beauty and The Beast opens today,”. “In this version of the story, Belle is the inventor instead of Maurice. That rings truer if you ask me. For some more movie fun, ask me something about Belle.”

Many pointed out that the feature is only promotional as it just mentioned about the movie but did not provide any means to book tickets. Google does not work in collaboration with services like Fandago and hence, the advertisement could not be mistaken for a special feature.

Just as the social media vituperated the tech giant, Google changed its stance immediately. It said that its Beauty and The Beast ad being read by Assistant was not in fact an ad. “This wasn’t intended to be an ad,” said a Google spokesperson. “What’s circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content.” in other words, Google says that they just wanted to keep users updated with whatever going on around you.

The search engine juggernaut kind of apologized “We’re continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users and we could have done better in this case.”

It was later confirmed by a source that Beauty and The Best message from Assistant has since been removed wholesale.

Anik is an IT professional and Data Science Enthusiast. He loves to spend a lot of time testing and reviewing the latest gadgets and software. He likes all things tech and his passion for smartphones is only matched by his passion for Sci-Fi TV Series.