Google Assistant becomes smarter

San Francisco, May 9: Making the competition in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered assistants space tougher, Google on Tuesday announced that people will soon have a choice of choosing from six voices, including one of musician John Legend, to talk to “Google Assistant”. At its annual developer conference Google I/O, the company said these six options, which feature both male and female voices, would be rolled out later this year.

Company CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google has been working on newer and more life-like version of its spoken AI that features natural voice that is “closer to how humans speak.” The improvements include more natural pauses “that have meaning” and other subtleties to help create a “more natural dialogue” with Assistant. This new version of the Assistant is built on a tech machine learning technology called Wavenet, which the company started building out some 18 months ago. Now instead of having to say “Hey Google” or “OK Google” every time to give a command, users only have to do this one time and then have a conversation with the Assistant.

Google calls this feature “continued conversation” and it’ll roll out in the coming week. The new powerful Assistant can now distinguish between two sentences that are joined by “and” and can reply with two different query-specific answers in one go. (IANS)

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