Hopefully you’re not too attached to the John Legend voice for Google Assistant, because it’s disappearing towards the end of this month.
Google confirmed the removal of the voice cameo earlier this morning on Twitter, suggesting that users enjoy the voice cameo while they can. The celebrity voice had a good run. Having been launched for users in 2019 during Google’s annual developer conference.
And Google never intended to keep the voice cameo forever. It confirmed after the launch that it was only available for a limited time. So nearly a year is probably better than most could have hoped for. This will leave users with one other celebrity voice option, Issa Rae, among all of the standard options that are there permanently.
The John Legend voice leaves Google Assistant on March 23
Google doesn’t lay out any specific times but it does note that the voice will be gone on March 23.
It’s safe to assume then that it will disappear from the voice options in the menu sometime early morning. So if you want to make the most of it, switch to it now and keep it as your active voice.
Once Google removes it, it should just default back to the standard option that you get when you first set up Google Assistant. If you switch to it now and just let Google do the work, then you won’t have to worry about changing things yourself.
More cameo voices will likely pop up in the future
Though Google is removing John Legend from the voice cameo options in a couple of weeks, you still have Issa Rae. That will no doubt be pulled at some point too.
But more voice cameos will probably be added in the future. When, and who the voices will be is anyone’s guess. And of course there’s always the chance that Google may never add anything like this in the future.
But it’s been a popular option so there’s no reason why Google wouldn’t want to add new voices down the road. For now, you have a little bit of time left to enjoy this particular voice cameo and then you will need to switch it up to one of the other options.
Even with just the standard voices there are plenty to select from too. So you won’t really be left with nothing.
“#HeyGoogle, serenade me one more time.” Enjoy @JohnLegend’s cameo Google Assistant voice before it comes to an end on March 23. https://t.co/C4vAzyl3x7
— Google (@Google) March 5, 2020