Sometimes, having a digital assistant can be life-saving, but at other times, it can be a complete nightmare. While things have come a long way in that regard since their inception on smartphones, Google is hoping to accelerate things further by introducing a new feature called “personalized speech recognition”, according to a report from 9to5Google. Essentially, it can store audio recordings of you on your phone to help with recognizing what you say, which is a similar technique to how the company already improved speech recognition on its smart hubs.

By decompiling a recent version of the Google app, parts of the code revealed a new feature that could be a game-changer for Google's digital assistant. “Personalized speech recognition” will reportedly enhance the digital assistant's ability so that it can get “better at recognizing your frequent words and names.” The following string was found.

        Store audio recordings on this device to help Google Assistant get better at recognizing what you say. Audio stays on this device and can be deleted any time by turning off personalized speech recognition. Learn more
    

Although the "learn more" portion doesn't have a hyperlink associated with it, the 9to5Google team thinks it could link up to an existing support article. The support article discusses Google's use of federated learning, which "learns how to adjust the model from the voice data, and sends a summary of the model changes to Google servers. These summaries are aggregated across many users to provide a better model for everyone." If this comes to fruition it could be quite interesting, as having Google Assistant learn a user's speech pattern could vastly improve the experience.

As mentioned previously, this information was found by looking through the decompiled code of the latest update. In other words, just because these strings have been added doesn't mean the feature will be added anytime soon. APK Teardowns offer mere glimpses of features that could arrive at some point. As a result, the feature may never see the light of day. You might have to wait a while to gain the aforementioned advanced features in Google Assistant.


Source: 9to5Google