Google has added some more new voices to Assistant amongst a couple of other new features. As reported by Engadget, there will be two new English-speaking voices for Google Assistant which are designed to sound more natural.
Google is always adding more features and innovations to Assistant as they look to continually improve its offering. Most recently Google has added a guest mode and some new security features to help its users.
Another interesting innovation is the fact that Google Assistant will gain access to sleep and fitness data. This integration is sure to help many of its users.
The introduction of some new voices is always exciting for Assistant users. One of the criticisms of these voices is how natural they sound and hopefully, these new ones will meet that standard better than previous efforts.
Google adds new natural sounding voices for Assistant
Google has used an update prosody model in order to achieve what they claim are more natural sounding voices. Engadget has access to one of the voices so we can get a sneak preview of how it will sound.
On the whole, the new voice sounds pretty good and is certainly an improvement on previous attempts. More natural is definitely a fair description of it.
However, you can still tell that the voice is artificial rather than totally natural. Although the fact that is has improved is probably all we can ask for and hope for more improvements in the future.
Google also added CVC entry payment authorization
Alongside the addition of new voices is the ability to use CVC entry as a payment authorization option on smart displays. Something many people have asked for a while has now rolled out to users.
This means that you can now confirm payments by simply punching in the verification code on the back of your card in. This should make confirming payments that little bit easier but also very secure for everyone.
Google has begun testing voice verification for payments earlier this year. That has now become more broadly available to users. It only works for certain types of payments but it is functional for some payment actions.
On the whole, these are interesting additions to Google Assistant. The introduction of new voices is always exciting and ultimately they are an upgrade. Hopefully, Google will continue to improve how these voices sound in the future as it certainly has room to get better.