With the advancement in technology, devices are becoming smarter and easy to handle. For letting users control the device hands-free smart assistants like Google Assistant and Apple Siri are already present. Both Google Assistant and Siri allow you to perform various tasks from setting alarms to playing music hands-free. With the recent update, Google Assistance pronunciations got much better.
The new update allows you to teach Google Assistant how to pronounce people’s names and teach it to recognize those names with better efficiency. Because Google Assistant performs all activities based on your voice search. This means it has to understand your words and recognize what they mean effectively. In simple terms, it needs to adapt to your way of speaking.
Another major reason for this update is the difficulty of understanding spoken language as it’s so contextual and depends on an individual’s way of speaking. In addition to this, if you have a name that’s not common it would be another problem for Google Assistant to recognize. Addressing both the issues, Google has introduced some new improvements.
These new improvements allow Google Assistant to adapt to users’ way of speaking more accurately. This means Google Assistant pronunciation and contextual awareness got enhanced for setting alarms and timer tasks. And it can be smarter at responding to your queries based on your search habits. Google informed in its blog post that these updates will be rolled out to users in the next few days.
Here are the details of the new Google Assistant Pronunciation update
If you’ve noticed that your Google Assistant has been mispronouncing your name or your contacts name. Which makes it difficult for you to make a call or send a text to that particular contact. But with the Google Assistance Pronunciation update, you can fix it pretty simple. Google informed that it has been working on this for a while. Now Google Assistant can accurately recognize and pronounce people’s names that are less common.
Once the update rolls out users can teach Google Assistant to pronounce and recognize your contact’s names as you generally pronounce them. Google Assistant will listen to the way you pronounce it and remember it and it won’t keep the record of your voice. So you don’t need to worry about privacy and security.
Once you complete the process, Google Assistant will be able to better understand you when you say those names. Not only that, but it can pronounce it efficiently. As of now, this feature will support English and it may support other languages going forward.
To try this feature practically, go to Google Assistant settings then click on basic info and Nickname. Simply pronounce the name as you did initially. Google also posted in its blog a video showcasing this feature. So we can say that the Google Assistant pronunciation got better and it is applicable for both your name and other contact names too.
Google enhanced its Assistant Contextual awareness along with its pronunciation
We often face this issue where we set timers with one phrase and we don’t recall the exact phrase for canceling it. Sometimes you may say the full phrase or not and stop mid-sentence to make changes to timers. In that case, Google Assistant needs to be flexible enough to understand what you are referring to. Because more than an exact phrase, context matters. This is what this new update brings to Google Assistance.
Google added Assistance pronunciation and contextual awareness to timers using its language understanding tech “BERT”. Google claims that this will enable all sorts of functionalities. Like you can say “cancel my second timer” instead of referring to the exact phrase that you have used. Also, Google posted a video where it uses for canceling a timer called “boiled potatoes” by saying “cancel my boiling potato timer”
In addition to this, we may expect other new improvements for its timers. One of these is generally when you create an alarm and inform the Assistant to add an hour to it. It will most likely just create a separate alarm for an hour in the future. With the new update, Google Assistant should understand what exactly means that you want your alarm to go off an hour later than the previous set time.
And Google informs that this new Assistant pronunciation and contextual awareness may come to more areas of the Assistant in the upcoming days. As of now, these improvements are limited contacts and timers.
Other details
Google’s new update makes Assistance pronunciation and contextual awareness better and efficient. This contextual awareness uses language understanding tech known as BERT. And this tech seems to be applied to assistants to improve the quality of your conversations with it.
Whenever you start a conversation with Google Assistant, it uses your previous interactions and understands what is currently being displayed. Along with it, it provides follow-up questions and lets you have a natural conversation with Google Assistant.
For example, if you have asked Google assistant about the best phones, then it will display some follow-up queries like “best phones in 2021” or “best phones under 10K ”. Overall this new update improves your search queries and setting timers. Along with improving Google Assistant pronunciations.
Conclusion
Google has improved Google Assistance pronunciations and contextual awareness with the new update. With this update, users can teach and make Google assistance pronounce names with better accuracy. And it has improved contextual awareness when it comes to setting timers and making conversations with Google Assistant. Google informed that this new update will be rolling out to users in the next few days.
