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Google is adding a new feature to Google Assistant, that will let users teach the AI-powered virtual assistant to recognise and pronounce names of people the way users pronounce them.
Assistant will listen to the pronunciation and remember it, without keeping a recording of the user’s voice. The feature will be available in English and the company hopes to expand to more languages.
“Names matter, and it’s frustrating when you’re trying to send a text or make a call and Google Assistant mispronounces or simply doesn’t recognize a contact,” Google said in a blog post.
“We want Assistant to accurately recognize and pronounce people’s names as often as possible, especially those that are less common.”
In addition to this, the tech giant has rebuilt Assistant’s language understanding models to accurately comprehend context and improve reference resolution. Google said this will help Assistant know exactly what a user is trying to do with a command.
The machine learning technology makes it possible to process words in relation to all the other words in a sentence, rather than one-by-one in order. The company claims that Assistant can now respond almost accurately to alarms and timer tasks.
These updates are now available for alarms and timers on Google smart speakers in English in the U.S., and will soon be available on other phones and smart displays.
