The Google Assistant now sounds significantly better, thanks to the magic of machine learning
The improvements are a result of Alphabet's 2014 acquisition of British AI firm DeepMind, which has since developed an audio neural network (it's 2017 so of course it's a neural network) called WaveNet. And while its debut was all the way back in 2016, the company has now announced its integration into the Assistant, hence the improvements. Hear for yourself:
Audio clip from before WaveNet:
Audio clip from after WaveNet:
In short, the differences are subtle but still fairly noticeable — the distinctive choppiness usually associated with computer-generated voices is completely gone, making the speech sound almost natural (proper intonation still seems to be a problem, though). And on the user-invisible side, the generation is also 1,000 faster than the previously used model, which we imagine will have a positive impact on Google's server electricity bill.
Right now, WaveNet has only been trained on U.S. English and Japanese only, so people using other voices won't hear a difference. However, we imagine other languages will also start utilizing the new technology some time soon. Until then, the source link below provides some more before/after examples, as well as a good explanation of how WaveNet actually works, so interested parties may feel free to check it out:
source: DeepMind via Android Police
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