Google is everywhere already from the first day of CES 2020, they have deployed an army of people in white uniforms to spread the gospel about the Google Assistant, the company’s digital concierge software all over the venue of the largest Consumer Electronics Show
Some of the major announcements made by google are
Google Assistant Webpage Reading
Google is making its assistant smarter by soon allowing Android devices owners to be able to say “Hey Google, read this page” and Assistant will fire up its neural networks to generate a pretty lifelike reading, with the system only reading the relevant text (assuming all is working as planned) while avoiding mentioning things like social sharing buttons or the page’s myriad navigation options. Google says it also wants to make the page auto scroll/highlight text as it reads, though it sounds like that may come a bit later down the road, According to google the technology is different from other screen readers because its speech software allows the audio to sound more natural and human, making it easier to understand over a long period of time.
Google Home
Google home will not let users schedule certain tasks. For example, if you have an internet-connected smart coffee maker, you can time it to brew a pot at 6 a.m. Another feature lets you upload contacts from your phone, from grandma to the vet, that you’re comfortable letting anyone in the house access make a call. Usually, Google only lets people call their contacts from a smart display if the Assistant recognizes the caller’s voice. That changes with the shared contacts feature.
Google is adding the ability to control more than 20 different types of devices through the Assistant. That includes things like an August Smart Lock, Telus Wi-Fi router or Meross smart garage door opener. The company is also expanding its partnerships with TV makers. It’s bringing the Assistant to Samsung’s new voice-enabled smart TVs later this year. Beyond that, Google is working with the Chinese companies Hisense and TCL to build more far-field microphones into their TVs, so they can work like other Google Assistant smart speakers.
Google announced the number of users on the google assistant service as 500 million people a month. Scott Huffman, vice president of engineering for the Assistant, said the product still has a long way to go, but the stat is meaningful. “It means that, in this space of having a human conversation [with AI software], we’re onto something,” he said in an interview. “We’ve tapped into something that is getting good enough that people are choosing to use it over the other ways to do things.”