At Google I/O 2018 we learned that the company is planning to add a number of new voices to Google Assistant. We weren’t told exactly when the new voices were rolling out but some people are seeing it in the application already and these steps show you how to switch to a different one.
Giving a virtual assistant a personality can seem rather odd at first glance. There are some who would rather hear a voice that obviously sounds like a computer while others prefer it when the voice sounds like a human. Google has done a lot of work to narrow the gap and their demonstration of Duplex shows that they can take it even further.
So it’s interesting that many would consider the virtual assistant from Samsung, Apple, or Microsoft to be more personal as they actually have a name.
With the Google Assistant though, it’s just a name of a product but the results not only sound more human but they have proven to be more useful than the competition as well. We will likely see these companies continue to compete in the virtual assistant category for another decade or so until a clear winner has been chosen. One of the latest features of the Google Assistant though is the addition of new voices that the user can pick. By default the Google Assistant has one male and one female voice but this new update adds 6 additional Google Assistant voices to the mix.
Some people are seeing these new voices in the settings of the Google Assistant while others aren’t. So if you are one of the ones who are still stuck with the default voices then wait patiently as this is a server side change that Google is doing to slowly roll out the new update to the community (meaning we can’t force it).
How to Change the Google Assistant Voice Tutorial
- Long press on the Home button (or launch the Google Assistant like you normally would)
- Tap the Blue icon at the top right of the screen
- Then tap the 3-d0t menu icon at the top right of the next screen
- And choose the Settings option in the drop down menu
- From here we can tap on the Preferences option
- Then tap on the Assistant Voice option
- So we can tap on the Google Assistant voice of your choice
- And then press the Home button to go back to the Home Screen
Explanation
From what I have learned, there are actually two different ways to change the voice of the Google Assistant. If you’re using a device like the Google Home, then you can bring up the Google Home application, locate your device and then go into the Settings of it to change the voice that is uses. We’ll just be focusing on the Google Assistant voice that is used on our smartphone or tablet though to make things easier to follow. So to start, we need to long press on the Home button to bring up the Google Assistant page.
Either that, or you will need to trigger your Google Assistant the same way that you normally do. With that new page up, look at the top right corner and you should see a Blue icon. Tap it and you’ll be taken the Explore page of Google’s virtual assistant. From here, look at the top right of the screen again and tap on the 3-dot menu icon that you see there. This will expand a drop down menu with a few options to choose from and we want to tap the Settings option from this list.
Now that we are in the settings area of the Google Assistant we can see there are a lot of things that we can do to customize it. We’ll be ignoring most of it here today though and focus on just the Account section at the top of the screen. Look through this list until you find and tap on the Preferences option and then from here you will see the Assistant Voice option right between the Weather and Getting Around options (at least that’s how it is laid out on my device as of writing this).
This is the page that will list all of the voices that are currently available for us to choose from. When Google Assistant first launched there was only one voice that it used but this grew to two a little while back. At Google I/O the company announced they were adding 6 additional Google Assistant Voices and this is where we can choose between them. Remember though, if you don’t see the additional voices here then that means the feature hasn’t been rolled out to your account yet.
For those of us who do see these additional options though, feel free to tap on any voice listed here so you can listen to how it sounds. I go through all of these in the demo video that I embedded above.
[sc name=”accessories”]
