If you’ve always thought that your digital assistants always sounded a bit robotic, we totally agree with you. However over the years as technology has improved, so has digital assistants where they now sound more human. You can still tell that it’s a computer speaking to you, but they do sound more natural these days.
In fact it seems that Google Assistant might have gotten some improvements in that area, thanks to the WaveNet technology that DeepMind have recently unveiled. WaveNet isn’t new per se as it was over a year ago that DeepMind announced it, but it seems that after a year or so, they have launched an improved version that they’re applying to Google Assistant for both US English and Japanese voices.
According to the company, “Over the last 12 months we have worked hard to significantly improve both the speed and quality of our model and today we are proud to announce that an updated version of WaveNet is being used to generate the Google Assistant voices for US English and Japanese across all platforms. Using the new WaveNet model results in a range of more natural sounding voices for the Assistant.”
For those unfamiliar, DeepMind was acquired by Google several years ago and it is more or less Google’s way of exploring AI, whether it be taking on Go world champions or learning the likes of StarCraft. In any case the updated Google Assistant can be found on your device, if not you can head on over to DeepMind’s website to listen to how it sounds.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence), Google and Google Assistant.