Skip to main content

Google rolling out on-device, real-time Gboard speech transcription for Pixel phones

For the past several releases, Gboard for Android has been working on “faster voice typing” that works offline. Google is today making it official on Pixel phones, and details the “end-to-end, all-neural, on-device speech recognizer” it created.

Google notes that a speech recognition “revolution” began in 2012 thanks to significant accuracy improvements with deep learning. The “prime focus” of various architectures was to reduce the time it takes for a user’s speech to be transcribed, or latency. Google notes how “an automated assistant feels a lot more helpful when it responds quickly to requests.”

The latest development from Google is an end-to-end, all-neural, on-device speech recognizer in Gboard when users tap the microphone icon in the top-right corner. It works completely offline and is only 85MB in size, compared to past models that were 2GB and later 450MB.

This means no more network latency or spottiness — the new recognizer is always available, even when you are offline. The model works at the character level, so that as you speak, it outputs words character-by-character, just as if someone was typing out what you say in real-time, and exactly as you’d expect from a keyboard dictation system.

Besides offline access, this new system outputs character-by-character, instead of one word at a time.

The RNN-T recognizer outputs characters one-by-one, as you speak, with white spaces where appropriate. It does this with a feedback loop that feeds symbols predicted by the model back into it to predict the next symbols, as described in the figure below.

Today’s advancement is due to various components of the speech recognition system being merged into one. A single neural network “directly map an input audio waveform to an output sentence.”

The new on-device voice typing is initially rolling out now to Pixel, Pixel 2, and Pixel 3 phones set to American English. To enable, head to Gboard settings > Voice typing > Faster voice typing. Google expects this to come to more languages and later other use cases.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

You’re reading 9to5Google — experts who break news about Google and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Google on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news:

Comments

Author

Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com

Manage push notifications

notification icon
We would like to show you notifications for the latest news and updates.
notification icon
You are subscribed to notifications
notification icon
We would like to show you notifications for the latest news and updates.
notification icon
You are subscribed to notifications