Google Home Update – Voice Recognition and Multi-User Feature

BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Google brought a major update for Google Home. More precisely, up to six people will be able to connect their accounts to Google Home. After listening to them speak, the assistant will be able to recognize their voice. Thus, only these people will be able to control the home device.

The first step for the users is to connect their account. Then, they will have to say “OK Google” three times, so that the device will memorize their voices. Afterwards, the device will call the name of the person who asked for information before giving the expected answer.

You might have to wait for a few days until Google rolls out this new feature for all devices. Before setting up more accounts, you have to receive the announcement which says that the multi-user feature is available for your device.

Identifying voice patterns to distinguish between the users

However, you might think that this voice recognition task is a difficult one. The device listens to you reciting the “OK Google” phrase and then, by using a neural network, it can identify certain characteristics typical of one’s voice. It will memorize these initial commands and compare the future ones with this first sample to determine which is the matching account.

When asked about this new feature, Google declared that they were confident that it would bring the best experience to their users. They will be constantly working on improving it and refining this voice recognition technique. However, users are advised not to rely solely on it as a security option.

Google Home still lacks the features available on smartphones

This might be a top feature, but it does not solve the issue so many users have been complaining about. Namely, the Google Home assistant lacks many features available on smartphones. It still cannot set reminders and events, or allow the users to send messages or make phone calls.

Google might be working on improving the experience of the users, but they still have to make some improvements. Google Home can be connected to all devices which run at least Android 6.0. Thus, if you connect your smartphone to the home device and give it certain command, Google Home would reply by telling you that it can’t do that yet.

When Google announced the multi-user feature, many expected that they would implement the smartphone features to the home device, too. Thus, they still have to deal with this before offering the perfect user experience.

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