Google can publish whatever research they want, literally doesn’t matter literally changes nothing because they can’t turn it into a product anyone can use and never will.
The home assistant speakers aren’t making enough money to justify the large teams behind them. Thus we’ve seen significant layoffs on those teams in the past year.
BigCos are looking for other ways to reduce costs. Killing features is one way to do it.
There have also been situations where a feature is removed because of legal action; lawsuits alleging the features violates a patent.
Live updates givith, live updates taketh away!
Of course building products for actual users is no longer a “thing”, but think of the stock price.