Over the last few years, digital assistants have become an integrated part of the smartphone experience. Google has worked hard on improving Android and Google Assistant.
Over the last few years, the Mountain View-based company has incorporated a lot of new features that make Google Assistant stand out from the rest of the competition. The company has now made significant improvements to its Natural Language Understanding model. This time, the tech giant’s focus was on the improvement of pronunciation of names and recognition of contexts in conversations.
According to the Google blog post, users can now teach Google Assistant how to pronounce their contact names just the way users do. You can watch the video below for a better understanding and see what improvements the Google Assistant features.
The company states that users can train their Google Assistant to better pronounce a contact name. It will remember it without having to keep a copy of your recorded voice. This will in turn result in a better pronunciation next time the contact is used.
Another improvement Google has made to the Assistant is a better understanding of the context. The company says that the improvements to the Natural Language Understanding model are made using BERT, which was first used in Google Search back in 2018. Instead of processing words one by one, BERT enables Google to process words in relationship with other words in a single sentence.
An example of the improved conversation is the ability to set multiple timers all at once.
Maybe you’ve got a 10-minute timer for dinner going at the same time as another to remind the kids to start their homework in 20 minutes. You might fumble and stop mid-sentence to correct how long the timer should be set for, or maybe you don’t use the exact same phrase to cancel it as you did to create it.
The company claims that the recent improvements will result in 100 percent more accuracy when setting up alarms and timers. It also says that using BERT will allow them to improve the quality of conversation with the Assistant. Google Assistant will be able to answer your follow-up questions in an improvised manner.
The changes are currently limited to English, with plans for rolling out the improvements to other languages currently under work.
