The six new Google Assistant voices promised by the Alphabet-owned tech giant yesterday are now available on Android devices globally, having started rolling out Tuesday. The voices can now be selected from the Settings screen of your Google Assistant tab which you can access by tapping the blue bracket icon in the top right corner of the helper’s interface, then pressing the three-dot icon on the following screen.
Following the server-side update, there are now eight Google Assistant voices in total, and with all of them now being available on Android devices, you can also use them on your Google Home-series speakers and other compatible gadgets. In other words, changing the Google Assistant voice on your Android smartphone will automatically make the switch on every other device supporting the digital companion to which you’re connected with your Google Account. There’s no way to assign different voices to multiple devices and the current implementation itself is inconsistent; limited testing performed by AndroidHeadlines revealed that while changing the Google Assistant voice on a handset automatically makes the same shift on a connected Google Home unit, the speaker sometimes reverts to the default (Voice 1) option for no apparent reason.
The exact sample available when deciding on a voice to choose is still the same as before, with the full transcript of it being “Hi, I’m your Google Assistant, here to help you throughout your day; and now you can choose from different voices for me to speak with.” John Legend’s voice will also be added to Google Assistant’s portfolio in the coming weeks, the company revealed during yesterday’s Google I/O 2018 keynote. Thanks to the latest advancements in WaveNet and general AI technologies from Google’s subsidiary DeepMind, new Google Assistant voices take only a few weeks to be captured and implemented into the service, so more are likely to follow soon. Google Assistant has been a major focus of yesterday’s I/O 2018 keynote and is expected to continue receiving significant updates going forward, especially in the context of Google’s long-term business strategy that’s primarily centered on AI and implementing such technologies into every possible digital service.