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:
m_p_w_84
<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>