From adding regional accents to multiple male and female voices, Google has made great strides in making computers sound more natural. According to a video posted today on YouTube, a new voice rolling out to Google Now takes that a step further…
In an exclusive interview with TIME, Google’s chief software engineer Amit Singhal revealed that the company once developed a wearable product which works in a similar manner to the Communicator pin badges worn by the Enterprise crew in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Bluetooth-connected lapel pin could be activated by a single tap and had a built-in microphone…
Google’s long stated vision, if not obsession, is turning your smartphone into the Star Trek computer. A key part of the computer on the Enterprise is that the primary means of interaction is through voice. The entire process mimics more asking a person a question rather than the ‘typing out what you want to know into a search box’ process that has made the Google so well known.
To meet this goal, the company has been continually doing massive research and investments into speech recognition and machine understanding. The latter is Google’s Knowledge Graph, announced in 2012, that understands concepts and their relationships between things.
These massive investments in speech recognition and Knowledge Graph ultimately culminated with Google Now. If ever there was a thing that paralleled the Star Trek computer in real life, it would be Now and its ability to provide verbal responses to verbally-asked questions. Now, Google is pushing the tech even further with Marshmallow and the new Nexus devices…
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Google today announced that it’s rolling out the first set of apps that support tie-ins to custom Google voice actions. This means that, yes, you’ll soon be able to say “Ok Google” followed by special commands that will let you interact with your apps in a variety of new ways…
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