Google Assistant Gets New Voices

Artificial intelligence powdered assistant is the in-thing now, with many of the world’s biggest tech companies jostling to dominate this emerging market it is a matter of time before we all become dependent on them just as we are now with smartphones.

Google Assistant is taking on head-long other well-known voice-controlled AI’s such as Amazon’s Alexa, iPhone’s Siri, and Cortana to become the go-to voice assistant. In a bid to shore up their user base, Google recently announced the introduction of additional six voices for their Assistant; bringing the total voices available for users to choose from to eight.

The announcement was made during the I/O developer conference held last week. According to Google, the voices were made by Wavenet, a neural network developed by their subsidiary DeepMind, the company that was involved in the creation of AlphaGo. The new introduction they said has three female and three male voices and one of the voices is that of the legendary singer and songwriter John Legend.

How do you give your Assistant a new voice?

There are two options to access Assistant’s voices – go through either the Google Home or Google Assistant app on your tablet or smartphone. If you’re on the Google Home, tap the three lines on the top left side of the screen, then tap more settings.

In the Assistant app, look for and tap the blue icon on the top right side of the screen; then tap settings. From here on, the steps are the same for both apps. Scroll down till you see the preferences, tap on it and also tap on the Assistant voice. This opens a window that enables you to preview each voice; have a listen and select the one you like. If all your devices and home appliances are synced, then the new voice would be heard on all of them.

So now you know how to select new voices for your Google Assistant, what else can this smart AI do?

Do you know, the pretty please mode can help you teach your kids and everyone else in your household their manners?

Well, the new feature ensures that the Assistant respond positively to any request when either “please” and “thank you” are said. It is also possible to enable the feature for specific members of your family; hence, you can encourage your kids to be polite without staying on their face. How about having your news read to you every morning? The Google Assistant not only delivers news from your favorite sources but also have it read them to you.

All you have to do is; tap the home button and when it asks “How may I help you” simply say “Good morning.” The app will go ahead to tell you the weather in your area as well as read the latest news to you. You can also do the same during the afternoon and or evening to get the latest gist.

So there you have it; there are, of course, a truckload of other things the Assistant is capable of doing. Explore the app to discover these exciting features for yourself.