The phrase essentially becomes both the wake word and the command. Now on the Nest Hub Max, you could program a short command like “Turn on the bedroom lights” as a quick phrase. Last fall, when the company introduced its Pixel 6 smartphone, it started supporting “quick phrases” on the phone, so you could accept or decline a phone call or stop timers and alarms without having to say “Hey Google” first. This is part of a broader effort by Google to let you skip saying “Hey Google” altogether. And those clunky wake words, i.e., “Hey, Google,” are slowly going away-provided you’re willing to use your face to unlock voice control. In an interview before I/O began, she gave the example of quickly ordering a pizza using your voice during your commute home from work by saying something like, “Hey, order the pizza from last Friday night.” The Assistant is getting more conversational. All of that promised convenience is closer to reality now, Hsiao says. During its annual I/O developer conference today in Mountain View, California, Google’s head of Google Assistant, Sissie Hsiao, highlighted new features that are a part of the company’s long-term plan for the virtual assistant. Google now says we’re on the cusp of a new era in voice computing, due to a combination of advancements in natural language processing and in chips designed to handle AI tasks. We were promised boundless intelligence we got “Baby Shark” on repeat. But ask most people what they use these assistants for, and the voice-controlled future sounds almost primitive, filled with weather reports and dinner timers. The usage of voice assistants has gone up in recent years as more smartphone and smart home customers opt into (or in some cases, accidentally “wake up”) the AI living in their devices. Embedded in this promise is, of course, convenience voice computing will not only be hands-free, but totally helpful and rarely ineffective. For years we've been promised a computing future where our commands aren't tapped, typed, or swiped, but spoken.

Conversational ai voice