Voice assistants have always promised more than they can deliver, but at Google’s I/O developer conference the tech giant unveiled an upcoming version of its Google Assistant that could make using your phone with your voice dramatically more useful.
Google’s next version of Assistant will be dramatically faster, hitting Pixel phones first
The next-generation Assistant will process requests up to 10 times faster
The next-generation Assistant will process requests up to 10 times faster
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In an onstage demo, Google showed how the next-gen version of Assistant could be used not only for basic searches and setting alarms, but also to operate your phone — composing a message to a friend, searching for a picture to attach, and sending it off, for example.
The company claims this new version of Assistant will process requests up to 10 times faster than the current model. That’s because Google has slimmed down the AI models used to listen to and interpret speech, making them small enough to run directly on-device, rather having to send data to remote servers for processing.
“By putting these AI models right onto your phone, we’re envisioning a paradigm shift,” said Google’s Scott Huffman onstage. “This next-generation assistant will let you instantly operate your phone with your voice, multitask across apps, [and] will even work offline.”
However, this next-generation version of Assistant is not yet ready to use. Google said it would be coming to the company’s latest Pixel phones “later this year,” but didn’t mention when it would be more widely available.
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