Outside the mammoth Google Assistant booth at the CES tech show in Las Vegas, live, human "assistants"were  handing out short surveys on the experience. One question asked "Have you seen the ads for Google Assistant on billboards, casinos, the monorail, and busses in Las Vegas?" Another: "Have you seen Google Assistant everywhere at CES?"

I answered yes to both. Google is unavoidable at CES 2018, and every few minutes you hear the distinctive bloop of the assistant firing up, from demos on the stands and in ads from every speaker.

It's a stark contrast to last year, where every other booth had Amazon's Alexa on show. The company's Echo smart speaker continues to dominate sales, with around 76 per cent of the US market, but Google is making up ground in the States, and selling in markets where Amazon isn't available. But at CES, Google is coming out with all guns blazing.

Assistant is moving into televisions from LG , Sony, Hisense and TCL, and into sound bars, speakers and headphones from Sony, LG, Bose, and Jabra.

JBL, LG, Lenovo, and Sony have near identical "Smart Displays", which feature the same voice commands of Google Home and a Google Now style display; always updating with the information Google thinks you'll want, from news and weather to your next calendar appointment.

Only in the automobile-focused North Hall was Alexa still king, with manufacturers Toyota and Lexus announcing new cars with Amazon's assistant built in. Still, Google was on show; the search giant is updating Android Auto to add Google Assistant to over 400 models of car already available, while Panasonic debuted a new headunit with Assistant and Alexa built in.

General Manager of Marketing at LG, Angus Jones, said the choice to go with Google Assistant was a simple one: "We think Google Assistant is the best choice for Australians."

Mr Jones points to Google's successful Christmas sales of the Home and Home mini in this country, sneaking in before Amazon's Alexa and Apple's HomePod have had a chance to launch locally, and Google's natural language processing, which he described as "best in class".

"The benefit of Google is you can ask it to do the same thing twenty different ways and know it will always understand you", he said. Amazon's Alexa on the other hand requires exact phrases to perform a task.

Meanwhile Samsung is doubling down on its personal assistant, Bixby. The company is adding Bixby to TVs and fridges for the North American market, but no word when we'll see the assistant in local products, beyond the Galaxy phones.

The TV demo was impressive. Watching Netflix in your living room, you could say "Hey Bixby, switch to the bedroom", and the living room TV will shut down, while upstairs your show fires up, to the exact moment you were up to, paused and waiting for you.

Samsung had a large section of its booth dedicated to "Project Ambience", a concept for embedding Bixby into lamps, coffee tables, and couches, which they hope to convince manufacturers to adopt.The company faces a near impossible task though, taking Bixby up against Alexa and Google Assistant in the voice command space.

That's not a reflection of the quality of Samsung's product, and I'd say the same about Apple's Siri. Google and Amazon have simply built such an enormous lead in the voice assistant market, it's hard to see anyone else catching them.