New voices for your Google Assistant in nine countries
One of the ways to personalize your Google Assistant is to choose its voice. As we’ve brought the Assistant to more languages—we’ve gone from eight in 2017 to more than 30 today—we’ve developed new voices in as many of those languages as possible.
You can already choose between 11 English voices here in the U.S. (including John Legend), and today, we’re launching a new voice in nine more languages: German, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Italian, Korean, Japanese, English in the U.K. or English in India. All the new voices rolling out this week were built with DeepMind’s state-of-the-art WaveNet technology which make them sound natural, with great pitch and pacing.
If you go into your Settings in the Assistant app, you can select from the different voices available. You’ll notice that we have a pretty unique way of displaying these voices too; the voices are displayed by color, rather than gender. We’ve learned that people enjoy choosing between voices to find the one that sounds right to them, and we think it’s important to present these voices to you without any labels.
We’re also trying to help more people experiment with the different voices too. If you live in one of the countries that’s getting a new voice, you’ll notice that we randomly assign you a voice when you first set up your Assistant, giving you a 50/50 chance of getting one of two voices—either the “red” voice or the “orange” voice.
A lot of people are surprised to learn that they don’t always stick with the voice they’ve been using, so give it a shot. You might just find one that sounds even better than the one you’ve been using.
