Google Assistant gets two new accents

If you fancy a spot of tea and wish Google Assistant could say the same thing with an English accent, you’re in luck. If you live in the U.S., Google is rolling out two new English and Australian accents.

According to Google, it made the new British Racing Green and Sydney Harbour Blue voices with DeepMind’s speech synthesis model WaveNet. The model uses neural networks to create raw audio waveforms.

The results are more natural-sounding and realistic voices for Google Assistant. The British and Australian accents sound convincing enough when selected, so the technology is seemingly doing its job well.

Google Assistant guide: Make the most of your virtual assistant

Features

To pick either of the two new accents, open the Google Assistant Settings menu. From there, go to the Assistant tab and select Assistant voice. You should be able to spot British Racing Green and Sydney Harbour Green.

The two accents work across all devices that support Google Assistant, including smartphones and Google Home speakers. Unfortunately, they only work for English speakers in the U.S. as of this writing.

All we have to do now is want until John Legend’s voice arrives for Google Assistant and we’ll be hunky-dory.

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