Google Assistant finally learns to pronounce your contacts’ names correctly

Google Assistant is great for knowing weather forecasts, checking scores of my favorite sports teams, or asking them to show nearby restaurants. But one of my vast complaints is that when I try to call a contact, it would often fail to recognize their name.

I’m from India, and because of the diverse nature of the names, people in my contact list and their pronunciations vary a lot. So it might be hard for Google Assistant to identify all of them every single time correctly.

To solve this problem, Google is rolling out a new update to the Assistant, which lets you teach it the pronunciation of specific contacts. This update will give you an option to either record your voice or spell out the accent. Check out how the feature works in the video below:

Once you record it, the Assistant will recognize that name the way you speak it.

This new tool is part of Google Assistant’s upgrade that also brings a better understanding of context through the company’s BERT language model, accurate ways to set and cancel multiple timers, and improved contextual conversations.

Currently, the name learning feature will be available in English, and the company aims to expand it to other languages soon. Google said that this function would be open to users in the next few days, and we’ll indeed write a guide on how to use it.

Originally published at https://www.techlofy.com on April 30, 2021.