New Delhi: In a bid to make it easier to converse with users, Google will let users talk to the Google Assistant without saying Hey Google. The tech giant will instead give users an opt-in feature of "Look and Talk" that will be rolling out for Nest Hub Max users in the US. Once you opt in, you can simply look at the screen and ask for what you need, the company said while announcing the feature at the Google I/O conference.
"Our first new feature, Look and Talk, is beginning to roll out today in the US on Nest Hub Max. Once you opt in, you can simply look at the screen and ask for what you need. From the beginning, we’ve built Look and Talk with your privacy in mind. It’s designed to activate when you opt in and both Face Match and Voice Match recognize it’s you. And video from these interactions is processed entirely on-device, so it isn’t shared with Google or anyone else," Sissie Hsiao, Vice President, Google Assistant, said in a statement.
The tech giant is also working towards making Assistant understand and process statements better. “We realize when evaluating real conversations, they’re full of nuances,” said Nino Tosca, Director of Product Management for Google Speech team and Google Assistant.
“People say ‘uhm,’ interruptions when two people are speaking back and forth, pauses, self-corrections — but we realized that with two humans communicating, these things are natural. They don’t really get in the way with people understanding each other.
"We’re trying to bring these natural behaviors to the Google Assistant so that a user doesn’t have to think before they say a command — or actually process the command in their head, make sure they have every word right and then try to get it out perfectly. We want you to be able to just talk to the Google Assistant like you would with another human and we’ll understand the meaning and be able to fulfill your intent,” Tosca added.