Now, while the Assistant can rap Eminem’s Godzilla easily, it struggles with names a lot. So, if you are someone who uses Google Assistant to make a call or send a message, you might be familiar with the situation when the digital assistant just cannot pronounce the name of your friend or colleague correctly and, in turn, cannot find the contact. This becomes pretty frustrating and makes the feature useless for the specific task.
Teach Google Assistant How to Pronounce Names
Citing this issue, the company recently rolled out an update for the Google Assistant, including a new feature that lets users teach the voice assistant how to correctly pronounce names. The company shared a video showcasing the feature, which you can check out right below.
So, as you can see, the feature resides inside the Google Assistant app. To access it, you have to go to open the said app, tap your profile icon at the top-right corner, and tap “You”. Here, you will find the default pronunciation of your name in the “Nickname” section and the default pronunciation of the names of your contacts in the “Your People” section. From there, you will now be able to replace the default pronunciation of your or any of your contact’s names by recording your own voice, pronouncing the name correctly. The Google Assistant will take your voice as a reference and correct itself to pronounce the name the next time. Apart from this, Google also rolled out a few more features for its Assistant. This includes fumble detection that will allow the assistant to detect a fumble in your sentence while setting an alarm or a timer. For instance, if you say “Hey Google, set an alarm for nine….no no, eight o’clock”, the Assistant will accept it without any issue. Moreover, you will be able to cancel specific timers and alarms amongst multiple of them more easily.
Availability
Now, as per Google, the new features for the Google Assistant are currently rolling out to Google smart speakers in English in the US. Going forward, the company will expand them to phones and smart displays soon.
