Woman Reveals 'Unofficial Assistant' in High-Flying Executive Job

A video of a woman joking that you don't have to be "smart" to work as an executive, thanks to help from Google, has gone viral on TikTok.

The video was shared by @mama_kacey01 and has received 1.3 million views since it was posted February 7.

A message overlaid on the clip says, "You must be smart to be in an executive position" while the footage shows a woman typing on a keyboard while sitting at a desk.

The second line of the message says "Me" as the video shows the phrase "how to spell re" being typed into Google's search bar, which shows various word options that begin with the letters "re." The screen's cursor is seen clicking on "how to spell receipt" before the clip ends.

A caption shared with the post reads: "'#Google is always here for me."

The post comes as the market for next-generation search engines was valued at $37.39 billion this year and is projected to reach $80.98 billion by 2029, according to a report by Mordor Intelligence, a market research company.

Google has dominated the search engine market since launching back in 1997.

As of July 2023, Google was reported to have 81.95 percent of the market share for leading desktop search engines worldwide, according to data compiled by Statista, a global data platform.

In 2001, Google launched its first spell-checking feature, which offered the phrase "Did you mean" with suggested spelling corrections. Previously, the search engine would find pages that had the same misspelling.

In 2004, the company introduced its autocomplete feature, which automatically shows predicted queries in the search bar as soon as a person begins typing, as seen in the TikTok clip. Today, on average, autocomplete is said to reduce typing by 25 percent and is estimated to save "over 200 years of typing time per day," according to Google.

With advancements in artificial intelligence technology, Google has developed enhanced ways to search, including its latest Circle to Search feature, unveiled last month. It allows users to search using a gesture, such as circling, highlighting, scribbling or tapping, on their phone screen.

Despite these advancements, a study released earlier this year, which looked at whether Google and other search engines are "getting worse," found that "all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content."

The study, conducted by German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, found that "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI."

Last week, Google's latest AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, faced a backlash over incorrect depictions of historical and current events.

'My Unofficial Assistant'

Users on TikTok were amused by the post and could relate to the scene in the clip.

Caramelo Malcriado wrote: "Bruh ChatGPT [an AI-powered chatbot] is my unofficial assistant."

User @prawncreative said: "I work in tech and 90% of my job is googling answers! keep going, you got this."

Ashleigh Marie wrote: "That's me, constantly searching up certain words or phrases at work."

DestinYLee04 said: "Haha I think everyone is guilty for doing this once in awhile."

Crystal Mejia wrote: "Listen if doctors can google so can I."

Newsweek has reached out to the original poster for comment via TikTok. This video has not been independently verified.

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