The Google Assistant now has a new voice. The company has recently added another voice under the Google Assistant Voice settings menu in the Google Assistant preferences. While many have come to know the Google Assistant’s voice to be female, a new update now lets users change the voice of the AI to that of a male’s.
The new setting now gives the Ai’s voice a new, husky male’s tone and can be configured across all of the user’s devices, be it on their iOS app, the Pixel phone or even on Google’s Home speakers and their newly launched series of smart home speakers as well. There is an inclination towards smart assistants among different platforms as Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant all started with female voice assistants.
Reportedly, the new feature was added to the AI assistant just moments before the Pixel 2 event. The new voice is called “Voice II” and is available in the US English version of the app only. By offering a newer voice option, there will be better diversity of different kind of voices for users’ preferences.
Hopefully, we may even come across different kinds of voices later on. Facebook’s user interface could also be adjusted to Pirate, to celebrate the Pirates of the Caribbean movie: Dead Men Tell No Tales earlier in the year. These kinds of features can offer better user experiences and bring a personal touch to users’ devices.
As mentioned by a report from Tech Crunch, the new update has not hit all Google Assistant-compatible devices just yet, and should be rolling out gradually across the world to supported handsets and devices. Many refer to their AI assistants as “her” or “she” even though their devices are genderless. This addition to the software gives devices their own personality and while manufacturers are humanising their AI assistants with more natural speech and intonation, adding gender into the mix will offer something for everyone.
Apart from the new feature of changing the voice, Google’s Pixel event also unveiled some new ways in which the AI’s voice assistant can be used, for example, by reading out stories to children, playing games and also for broadcasting messages to multiple Google Assistant devices at a time. Of course, Google will be continuously improving the Assistant’s abilities at being more intuitive over the course of more updates.
Hopefully, that pirate voice will come soon enough.
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