Google Assistant’s Voice Match Now Works on More Smart Speakers, You Can Also Set a Default Speaker

Google will be rolling out additional features for its artificial intelligence-based voice assistant - Google Assistant - to various new devices starting this week. The most important of these features is voice match, which allows smart speakers to recognise the voice of the specific user, and personalise responses for that user. It will also now be possible to adjust sensitivity for detecting the hot-word used to invoke Google Assistant, and also select a default speaker from the Google Home app on your smartphone.

The Mountain View-based Internet company announced the new features through an official blog post, and the features will be rolling out starting this week to a wider range of smart speakers. The full suite of Google Assistant features has already been available for Google's own smart devices, such as the Google Home and Google Nest Mini smart speakers. With this update, these features will be available to Google Assistant even on third-party devices such as the Lenovo Smart Clock and Bose Portable Home Speaker.

Voice match is capable of recognising up to six unique voices for each smart speaker; different members of the family can get personalised responses or set specific reminders that will be served to that particular user. Hot-word sensitivity will allow users to set how easily the speaker can detect the phrase, which could help overcome accidental invocations and multiple speakers detecting the wake phrase. Finally, setting a default speaker will trigger that speaker for specific tasks, regardless of which Google Assistant-powered device receives the command.

Google Assistant is available on many smart devices, including smartphones, smart speakers, smart televisions, headphones, and more. The voice assistant allows users to access information or control devices with their voices, offering hands-free convenience regardless of the device in use. With this update, many more smart devices will gain additional capabilities that have thus far been limited to Google's own hardware.

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