Google Assistant’s New Voices Introduced in the US

According to media reports, Google Assistant users in the US can now change the voices of their assistants. This happened a day after Google announced the addition of six new voices to its Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Assistant.

“Google I/O, the annual developer conference was held on 8th May, 2018. Google announced that the users would soon have access to choose from six different voices, including one of renowned musician John Legend. With these six new options, which constitutes both male and female voices, there are now four different male voices and four different female voices, all with different tones.

Steps to Change Google Assistant's Voice

In order to change the Assistant's voice, listed below are the steps you need to follow:

• Launch the Home Application
  
• Tap on the Menu icon in the top left corner of display
• Locate the Google Assistant subheading and select More settings
• From the sub-menus list, select Preferences
• Then open Assistant Voice and choose the voice you want from each of the eight voices to hear and pick your desired voice

Uses and Further Developments

The new version of the Google Assistant, with its newly added voices, is built on Machine Learning (ML) technology called Wavenet, which the company started building out some 18 months ago.

These voices could be used to interact with the Google Assistant in Google Home, smartphones or tablets, Android TV, and Android Auto.

Company CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google has been focusing on newer and more real-life version of its spoken Artificial Intelligence, that features a natural voice that is very "closer to how humans actually speak".

The developments being worked upon include more natural pauses that are more relevant and other subtleties also, to develop a more naturalistic conversation with Assistant.

Conclusion

So with this new speaking ability and improvements, Google Assistant is about to get much closer to hitting a milestone in the evolution of computing surpassing the Turing test. Another new technology, being referred to as Duplex technology, was first proposed by an English computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950. It is a way of potentially analyzing a machine's ability to display intelligent behavior. To pass this test, a computer's natural language responsiveness would have to sound exactly like a human's voice.