We all love the Google Now voice assistant feature on our Android smartphones, don’t we? And now, Google has announced that is working on a new, personalized AI assistant that can work offline. Essentially, Google Now will soon be able to work without being connected to the Internet and that’s a huge relief.
The company has published a research paper where it has detailed the new offline speech recognition system, and also revealed that it tested the new system on the Nexus 5 without a data connection.
At present, all speech recognition programs like Google Now, Siri and Cortana all depend on cloud-based systems for which the memory required is huge. The paper reveals how the engineers used deep machine learning techniques to run a not so heavy speech recognition program that will be accurate and will have low latency, reports the ZDNET.
How did they achieve the results?
To test the system, the researchers used approximately 2,000 hours of anonymized Google voice search traffic, totaling up to 100 million utterances, and added in noise from YouTube to imitate real-life conditions.
The team then, through a variety of computational models, was able to come up with a voice system that not only runs from the user’s smartphone, but runs seven times faster than the current version of Google Now on the Nexus 5. While the present version takes up a considerable amount of space, the new version of Google Now takes up just 20.3MB of storage.
How will this new development be helpful?
- This new development would test Google’s advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence research.
- With internet speeds being a major problem in India, this update can surely be of a great help to consumers
- Also with an option of working offline, Android smartphone users can expect more battery and faster results.
If you are a technological genius, you can read the entire paper published by the engineers, here.