Google made improvements to its assistant that allow it to better understand the user’s context to perform tasks more efficiently, such as setting alarms and timers, improving the naturalness of conversations, and understanding and saying the names in the contact list more accurately.
The user will be able to help the assistant to “say and recognize” the names in his contact list in the same way that he pronounces them without the assistant being left with any recording of those pronunciations.
This process will allow you to better understand the user when they repeat the name, as well as to better pronounce it yourself. The tool will be available in English in the next few days, but Google assures in its blog that they hope to expand the service to other languages ”soon.”
Second, the tool now understands the context “more precisely” and understands what the user is trying to do when ordering something thanks to the improvement of its natural language understanding model. State-of-the-art BERT technology allows words to be processed in relation to one another, has made this breakthrough possible.
In this way, there is now “almost 100 %“ accuracy when programming alarms and timers, although the user expresses himself differently when programming them than when canceling them or cutting the phrase in half to modify the hour of the timer, for example.
The company ensures that in the future it will take this feature to other use cases so that the Google Assistant can continue to learn to better understand users. It is currently available in English for smart speaker alarms and timers in the United States only.
K. Tovar
Source: dpa
