Google Assistant is one of the better voice assistants out there and the company today unveiled some major improvements for it. Dubbed the next generation Assistant, it’s a substantial improvement over the Assistant that’s already available on more than a billion devices in more than 30 languages across 80 countries. The company has been working to make the Assistant the fastest and most natural way of getting things done.
Google is leveraging recent advancements in recurrent neural networks to develop entirely new speech recognition and language understanding models. This brings down 100GB of models in the cloud down to less than half a gigabyte. It means that the models can now run on-device, thus enabling your phone to process speech on the device itself at almost zero latency.
With on-device speech recognition, Assistant can process and understand requests as the user makes them and then deliver the answer up to ten times faster. This makes dictating emails faster than ever before, for example, or jumping between apps with just voice commands.
Google today confirmed that the next generation Assistant will be available on the new Pixel smartphones that are due later this year. It may be a while before it arrives on other Android-powered smartphones.
Filed in . Read more about Google Assistant and Google I/O 2019.