Google Assistant Adds A Second Voice Option In Nine Countries

Google Assistant is useful for a lot of Android users. Even though the voice does not matter technically – it does affect the user experience in a big way. And, this was the reason why Google added almost 11 different voices for U.S users (that included John Legend‘s voice as well).

Now, they want to expand the ability to have more voice options to nine different countries (with nine different languages).

Not everyone is looking forward to it – but it adds another way to personalize your experience with the Google Assistant.

Here are the languages added with a second voice option on Google Assistant:

• English in the UK
• English in India
• German
• French
• Dutch
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian

So, for English – both India and the UK will have a secondary voice option to choose from. The availability of other languages will depend on where you live. You can find the option to change the voice in the settings of your Assistant app.

It is also interesting to note that Google no longer filters the voice as per the gender – instead, they are moving to color codes (like orange and red). The new voice options are orange and red. These new voices are all built with DeepMind’s state-of-the-art WaveNet technology. So, even though they are synthetic, they are tailored to sound natural.

If you already own an Android device, you may head to the Assistant’s settings to utilize the second voice option. But, if you’re setting up Google Assistant for the first time, the voice will be randomly assigned with a 50-50 chance of getting either the ‘red’ or ‘orange’ voice. This is just a part of Google’s experiment to see what people like more and whether they change it later, as mentioned in their official announcement.

What do you think about the new voice additions? Do you prefer having a ‘real’ voice on Google Assistant or machine-generated? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

 

Ankush Das
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: assistant, Google