Google Assistant Gets New British and Australian Accents

Google Assistant is getting some new features just in time for the holidays: new accents. If you are in the United States, you can now have the Assistant speak to you in a British, or an Australian accent.

You can choose the new voices for your Assistant by navigating to Settings on your phone, finding the Assistant tab, and going to the Assistant Voice page. From there, you can choose either the new British Racing Green voice or the new Sydney Harbour Blue for the Australian voice.

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Although the addition of the new accents is more than welcome, they aren’t exactly natural as you will see on the video below. That’s because they are powered using DeepMind’s WaveNet technology which uses deep neural networks to generate raw audio waveforms — in other words, it tries to make computers sound more natural. The voices do sound more natural than some other assistants, but there’s a ton of room for improvement here:

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Conversation 8 comments

  • m_p_w_84

    13 December, 2018 - 12:59 pm

    <p>Weird they wouldn’t launch the British accent in Britain! </p><p><br></p><p>I’m in the UK and we do have a few choices of voice, but weirdly not all devices support them. So the voice on my google mini is different to the one on the home hub.</p>

  • obarthelemy

    13 December, 2018 - 2:57 pm

    <p>*That's* why they removed "don't be evil" from their motto !</p>

  • Jorge Garcia

    13 December, 2018 - 3:25 pm

    <p>Or, "Google now allows you to strip away the American accent from Google Assistant" :)</p>

  • MarkH

    Premium Member
    13 December, 2018 - 4:43 pm

    <p>Hmm, not seeing the options quite yet. Probably just rolling out slowly.</p>

  • ablinyvonne

    13 December, 2018 - 6:44 pm

    <p>My Daughters RANGE ROVER COMES STANDARD WITH A UK ENGLISH ACCENT SHE WANTS IT TO BE UK SCOTTISH </p>

  • glenn8878

    13 December, 2018 - 10:37 pm

    <p>Posh or Cockney will be amazing. </p><p><br></p>

  • ponsaelius

    14 December, 2018 - 3:20 am

    <p>In other news. Cortana is still not fully functional outside the USA. Microsoft wonder why Google Assistant and Alexa are winning the consumer AI battle.</p>

  • timwakeling

    14 December, 2018 - 5:25 am

    <p>That UK voice sounds exactly like the Google Assistant has always sounded in the UK. I guess all that's happening here is that the US is getting access to our accent. :)</p>

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